Prince of the Morning Star
by Heir of the void
Summary: When a young man is cast into a ruined world inhabited by monsters and within the grasp of vampires, the only edge that might give him a chance to survive is strange magic granted to him by a maybe fallen angel. But though he finds a third group in the ashes of Japan, one descended from the Navy of his homeland and wielding the eldritch Ars Machina, humanity may yet fade away.
1. Chapter 1

**So, this started as an S.I., though I made some modifications to the Insert, and now I have this. Enjoy.**

 **Prince of the Morning Star**

 **Chapter 01:**

I stepped out of the building and into the sunlight and looked around. Something, I couldn't quite say what, was different. Nothing quite looked the same anymore. My legally mandated education was finished, and I was moving on into a new chapter of-

Everything froze. A stray newspaper blowing in the wind, a bird gliding down from the top of a small tree, even a cloud lazily drifting across the sun.

For a moment, the world was still. Then, as the color seemed to fade from everything, the world seemed to dissolve like sand in the wind, everything breaking into infinitesimally small particles and blowing away before vanishing entirely.

Within seconds, I was standing on a jet black plane under a sky of pure empty white. I looked around, the shock of... whatever it was that was happening failing to sink in.

The black plane seemed to stretch out to infinity under the white sky, not curving away like the surface of the earth. As I turned around slowly, I saw nothing but level black in all directions.

Completing a full revolution, I returned to my original facing. The world was empty.

" **There are those who take lives."**

The voice was not particularly loud, but it seemed to speak from everywhere. It was deep and incredibly resonating. While I couldn't say what marked it as special, I knew, instinctively, that the speaker was a being of incomprehensible power. The merest sliver of its shadow existed in a start of being impossible for a human mind to even understand in abstraction.

" **They chose this path, and it benefits them. This is readily apparent."**

The voice said nothing for a moment. It was a deeper scilence than I had ever heard.

" **There are others who save lives."** The voice said. **"This burden can be heavy, but it is also clearly just. Thus, it clear why they make such a choice."**

Stillness returned. It lasted for an instant, then died an eon later.

 **"But most are neither of these. They simply exist, being destroyed or saved. They have no power over their future, and there is a freedom in this. Nothing must concern them, because nothing they do can change anything. They cannot improve something, but nor can they ever do any true harm. Some know this and chose this role, but for most, it is never a conscious choice."**

I said nothing. I had no idea what I would say, and I could not comprehend how it could matter.

" **There is always some degree of choice, but it rarely exists without external influence. But if you possessed complete freedom, what path would you chose?"**

I paused for a moment, but the choice was obvious.

"I would be one who protects others." I said. "I would stand against those who would do harm, and cut at the root rather than treating the symptoms."

 **"You are mixing metaphors."** The voice said. **"But this true. More pertinently, it is the desired answer. You are suitable to advance."**

"Advance to what?" I asked, before I could think better of it. "Am I dead?"

 **"In a manner of speaking, yes. Death is such an interesting concept. Certainly, your body is no longer conducting biological processes, and your soul is no longer congruent with and point that could be reached from you world of residence. But you continue to exist, and you still possess causal potential in this metasolution, though a different answer may have changed that."**

"That's reassuring." I muttered. I was having trouble processing how close I had come to... something bad.

" **You will be moving forward shortly."** The voice said. **"And you will face much greater threats before long."**

Abruptly, a large desk that appeared to be an extension of the ground appeared, along with a chair of similar construction. A plain knife of polished steel, a bowl of dull gold with angular runes the color of ash carved into it, and a plain white candle standing in an obsidian holder sat in a neat row on the desk.

A plain golden ring sat in front of them.

" **Your trials will be arduous, but I can offer you power. It will be of great assistance, but such power always carries a cost. If you wish to claim it, then you know how."**

And much to my surprise, I did.

The decision was nearly instant. I was nothing. Maybe I was a bit smarter than some, but I possessed nothing to leverage. If I was really going to face serious, probably deadly, challenge, I needed an edge.

I stepped forward and sat down, pulling the chair forward toward the desk. All four objects were within easy reach, but I picked up the ring first and examined it.

Despite the gravity of the situation, all I could think about was how much it looked like the One Ring.

Placing the ring back on the table, I picked up the silver knife. It was formed from a single piece of metal, and the handle transitioned to the blade without any type of guard. I placed my left thumb and pointer finger on the wick of the candle, pressed it between my fingers, and made a snapping motion and withdrew my hand. Half a second late, the candle burst to life, though it burned with a rushing bluish flame more like a bunsen burner than any candle I knew of.

Moving my hand down to the very end of the knife's handle, I placed the point of the knife just under the tip of the flame, where the temperature would be the highest. Carefully, I pushed the knife through the blaze, lifting it free when the handle began to enter the flame.

I repeated this process once, then began a third pass. This time, I thought I could see faintly glowing white patterns on the blade as it passed through the flame, but they faded before I could be sure of anything.

Rotating the knife ninety degrees, I placed the base of the blade in the flame, left side facing down. I slowly pulled it out of the fire, replaced it, and withdrew it again.

As I was completing the third pass on the left side of the blade, I realized that the handle of the knife seemed to be getting colder as I ran it through the flame, though I could faintly feel the heat from the candle on my hand.

Beginning the same process with the right side of the blade, I noticed that the knife looked... different, somehow. Like it was more _real_ than before I had begun treating it.

Finishing the third cycle with the right side of the knife, I pushed the candle back slightly, and then pulled the blow towards me. It was about the size of a soup bowl, though it had significantly thicker walls and thus would hold somewhat less.

I placed the tip of the knife on the edge of my left palm below my pointer finger and took a deep breath. It had to be the left hand; it was close to the heart, but a hand had a powerful cognitive connection to the idea of a ring, and thus was ideal.

Holding my hand over the bowl, I began to cut diagonally across my palm. It occurred to me that this was probably some form of blood magic, and that was maybe a bad thing.

The knife cut easily, with surprisingly little pain. I had never cut human flesh, but I sometimes helped with the butchering on the occasional hunting trip, and the knifework that required was always much harder.

I felt oddly detached as I saw blood well up from the cut, far more than from any of the nicks I'd received when building my miniatures. It was probably more blood than I'd ever lost at once before, and I was fairly sure the cut was bleeding a lot more than it should have.

But really, I was probably the idiot for assuming that anything would be normal at this point.

The blood running down my hand began to trickle into the bowl and pool in the bottom as I finished the cut. As the bowl filled, the blackened runes carved into it began to glow with a soft white light.

As once the bowl was perhaps a quarter full, I pick up the ring with my good hand, held it over the bowl, and let it fall.

Time seemed to slow as the bottom of the ring contacted the surface of the fluid in the bowl. The candle went out, the glowing runes on the bowl went dark, and as the blood seemed to leap upwards and engulf the ring, light vanished.

I felt a flare of pain leagues apart from anything I had ever considered flare across the cut on my left hand. Then my heart filled with fire, putting the pain in my hand to shame. For a moment, everything I was submerged, and I could feel myself slipping from consciousness.

Then something vaguely like a spike pierced my brow, and for a moment, I _was not_.

I existed again. I had no way of judging how long I had been gone, but somehow I knew it was only a moment. My mind felt different somehow. It was hard to put into words, but the best comparison I could make was that it felt like I had been disassembled, carefully and thoroughly cleaned, examined, and polished, and then reassembled. I had no idea how I knew this.

A point of light appeared at eye level a few feet away from my face, quickly growing into a flame larger than a man as light returned.

I was standing on a platform of polished black marble perhaps twenty feet on a side, suspended in space and surrounded on all sides by a vortex of slowly rippling shades of blue and purple, most sufficiently dark as to be difficult to distinguish from the platform.

Then the massive flame in front of me flared up for a moment and then died, leaving behind a young woman unlike anything I had ever seen.

She was tall, probably a couple of inches taller than I was, and I was a few hairs under six feet. She had straight, jet-black hair that hung down to the nape of her neck, contrasting starkly with her radiant white skin. Her features were royal and perfect, but no so perfect that she appeared unnatural. She wore a strange costume of red and orange, highlighted by deep black. It fit her form perfectly from her neck down, extenuating her ample figure, thought the extensive elevated and flowing decorations made it surprisingly modest.

"I am Seylaifeil, lady of fire and shadow." She said in what sounded like a ceremonial tone, her voice surprisingly pleasant. "You have called and I have answered, and by Fire, Steel, and Blood our bond has been sealed. We shall walk the same path into the future, till sun is gone, till shade is gone, till flame is gone."

I raised an eyebrow. I had hit a maximum level of what and simply looped back around to being calm. A woman had appeared out of a column of fire and called herself Sey La Fe El, so things were starting to move back towards normal.

The fact that I could say that and be completely honest should probably have had me a lot more worried than I was.

"To be honest, though, I'm surprised you survived that." Seylaifeil said, her voice relaxing to what I assumed was a conversational tone. "Not many humans could."

"You seem remarkably unconcerned about that." I muttered. "And what would have killed me, anyway?"

"I am a spirit of paradox." Seylaifeil said simply. "Fire and Shadow, Light and Darkness; diametrically opposed and yet inherently codependant. Most human minds can't handle something like that, not truly. And if it had torn you apart?"

She shrugged, a surprisingly human gesture. "I had no connection to you, no reason for concern. Nothing like now."

"So... What now?" I asked. "I mean..."

"We are about to go into battle." Seylaifeil said, taking a step forward. "I believe we will be fighting Vampires."

I opened my mouth.

"Not those stupid sparkly Vampires." She said. "Think Stoker on crack. Plus, they rule most of what's left of the world, farming humans for blood in exchange for nominal protection from the post-apocalyptic abominations."

"Why are we ripping off _Seraph of the End_?" I muttered. "I think-"

"We aren't." Seylaifeil said plainly. "That's where were going. Or rather, where we are going is _Seraph_. Chicken, eggs, after all. It isn't really possible to say which came first."

"How do you-"

"I looked through your head." Seylaifeil said. "I'd make a joke about it being traumatizing, but frankly it was disappointingly tame. There were a few defects, which I fixed, and I changed a few other things, but-"

"You did-"

"The time for discussion has ended." Seylaifeil announced. "We have arrived."

"I-"

The entire world turned to no particular color at all.

[x]

I was standing on a ruined city street. Most of the buildings appeared to be intact, if decayed, but the few dilapidated vehicles I saw were clearly rusted and decayed into uselessness. If this was _Seraph_ , then the world had ended eight years ago, so that was about right.

The concrete road and sidewalk were badly cracked, and the few signs that remained eligible were in Japanese. It occurred to me that it might be a problem that I had no knowledge of Moonspeak.

"That won't be a problem. I can translate anything intended as a language"

Seylaifeil's whispered voice echoed in my ear. I wasn't even surprised anymore.

Abruptly, the meaning of the signs was clear. They were pretty much the same as the signs in any American city I'd visited.

The sound of gunfire echoed in the distance, followed by fainter clangs of metal on metal. Apparently, the battle had already started.

"It might be worthwhile manifesting your armor." Seylaifeil said. "There are more than a few foes approaching, and they will not hesitate to end you."

"Great." I said. "How do I do that?"

"You already know." Seylaifeil replied. "And you will need to use my power to defend yourself. I specialized... Well, now we, specialize in Rapid-Action Cognitive/Somatic Kinetic Spellcraft, with a focus on Evocation and Conjuration."

"So its blow stuff up magic." I said.

"You _could_ say that." Seylaifeil muttered.

"Good. That's my favorite kind."

I deployed my armor. I can't really say how, but calling it an act of will is probably as close as I can get without sixteen hours and a chalkboard.

The plate covering my body was a full suit that covered everything below my chin in intricately articulated rigid plates, though I felt no restriction on my movement or significant encumbrance as I took a few experimental steps.

The immaculate suit of plate armor was colored a bright, deep gold that managed to be resplendent, but not ostentatious or dangerously reflective. The gold was highlighted and ornamented by flowing veins of obsidian, giving it a unique contrast that reminded me of Seylaifeil's human appearance.

I heard quick, surprisingly light footsteps, rapidly moving towards me. Quickly, I ducked through the long-gone frontal display of some sort of retail store and began moving towards the back, where I took up a position behind a mostly-intact merchandise shelf.

Discretion is the better part of valor, and I had no idea how to fight.

From my hiding place, I had a fairly clear view of the street, and I watched as ten figures in grey robes with black trimming walked into view in a lose patrol pattern. Eight of them carried a variety of piercing or slashing close combat weapons, and the other two had heavy assault rifles.

Vampires.

The group was about halfway through my field of view went one of the vampires held up his free hand beside his head in the universal signal for 'halt'.

He said something to another vampire with a sword and a slightly more ornate uniform, probably a leader, and the unit began to fan out and approach my store.

I closed my eyes. They _would_ find me, but trying to go through them would be suicide. I needed to act when I had some distance from them if I wanted any chance of survival.

Taking a deep breath, I turned around, locating the back door of the store, lowered my shoulder, and charged.

Smashing through the door in a cloud of rust and splinters, my momentum carried me forward into the street. I stumbled, then caught myself and began running.

I made it three steps before something struck my back, sending me sprawling.

Catching myself better than I would have expected, I turned to face the Vampire who had knocked me down.

She was tall, with short black hair pulled into a messy bun and a club at least eighteen inches long in the hands.

"What the hell _are_ you?" She spat. "Those Demon Army freaks don't wear armor, and any other animal would know better than to run from their betters.

Then, moving with incredible speed and sinuous grace, she sprang forward and began smashing the vambrace on my left forearm with her club. It broke on the third blow, and then her fourth blow stuck my arm.

The bone broke instantly. Somehow, thought the sudden spike of agony, I felt blood begin trickling across my skin. It was painful, but I had recently experienced worse.

The vampire licked her lips and took a worrying step forward. "There's time for a quick drink. I might need it when we run into real warriors."

I realized I couldn't move my left hand at all. I started to panic, and any witty retort I might have been able to conjure fled. She had beaten me like I was nothing. As she stepped closer to me and bared her fangs, I realized I really was about to die.

The vampire smashed my right thigh, striking my tissue twice this time, her club dripping blood as she removed it from the wound. The surge of pain was incredible at first, but it began to fade almost immediately. Judging by the gradient of pain, I realized she had probably opened my femoral artery. Something seemed wrong. I shouldn't have been bleeding out so quickly. But that was a silly concern. I was clearly dying.

Separated from home by an incredible distance along an axis I couldn't even understand, falling to the enemy of mankind within minutes of my arrival, without having attempted even a single blow. No one who cared about me would ever find my body, or have the slightest inkling of what happened to me. I would simply become another unresolved disappearance, swiftly blown away on the winds of time.

The vampire leaned over me, and my terror finally faded into apathy.

I was lost and alone and so very cold.

"Will you end like this?" Seylaifeil whispered, a slight edge to her voice. "Are you really going to let yourself die so meaninglessly?"

And then I realized I could do something.

It was like I had something I had never noticed before. It wasn't like I was discovering my arms or sight; it was more like I had spent my whole life as a quadriplegic telemarketer who was fed intravenously and never left a small, dim closet.

I could feel something indescribable in the world around me, winds of light that spun in an infinitely complex and endlessly changing pattern. I could feel the patterns washing over me.

And I could feel the maelstrom coursing through every drop of blood and every inch of nerve in my body. A warm, comforting flame began to burn around my wounds, flesh knitting together as it was rejuvenated by the fire of life.

I held up my right hand, fingers spread, and pointed it at the vampire.

" _dying stars._ " I muttered.

Silvery strands of light began firing from my fingertips in quick succession, time seeming to slow as they arced away from me in a wide fan.

The vampire never had a chance. She was standing in front of a shotgun, and she was struck by well over a dozen filaments of light all across her body. Each one burned a quarter-sized hole through the vampire's body as it passed. She looked down in shock, eyes widening in pain. Some horrible realization seemed to dawn on her face, and then she burned away. Flames spread outward from her wounds like lit paper, and within a second, she was reduced to dust.

For a moment, I sat still, hand outstretched, stunned. I had just done... Something, that was for sure. The world around me was still infused with wonderful light, but it was no longer overwhelming. Likewise, I could actually feel my wounds slowly knitting themselves closed.

Then, a groan of tortured steel filled the air, and I watched, mildly shocked, as the building in front of me collapsed. Apparently, the strands of light had been just as effective on reinforced concrete and structural steel as they were on vampire.

"Excellently done." Seylaifeil said. "Though try to avoid getting hit like that again. My cauterization blessing can repair extensive damage, but its almost exhausted for now. Also, more foes are approaching. Prepare yourself."

I barely had time to register her words. Just as she finished speaking, a grey-clad vampire appeared, charging over the top of the collapsed building. Not even pausing, it sprang off the pile of rubble in a long running jump, two of its comrades appeared behind it and imitated its maneuver.

Ballistic trajectory. Cavalry charge. Momentum.

" _duskblade_ "

As I spoke, I tapped into the storm of power in my blood, Seylaifeil's power, but somehow differently than when I had killed the first vampire, it was the opposite face of that power, its mirror image. Different, yet identical.

On either side of me, a dozen tendrils of darkness sprang up from somewhere behind me and shot forward, growing into almost crystalline spears of obsidian black. In a moment, there was a small thicket of spears filling the space in front of me.

It would have been a simple thing to avoid, but the airborne vampires lacked any method to meaningfully alter their trajectory.

One of them took a spike to the eye and began disintegrating as she fell to the ground, but the chest wounds suffered by the other two as they crashed through the obsidian spears were apparently less than fatal.

I stepped back as the vampires dropped to the ground, one of them landing noticeably better than his blood-covered comrade. The bloodier vampire snarled, raising its sword over its head and charged.

" _terminator line._ " The name referred to the outer edge of the illuminated side of a planet, but it was a cool name in any case.

A lance of light shot from my hand, ending the war for the charging vampire. His companion followed moments later. As the rest of the vampire squad charged over the ruined building, they each met a similar end.

Their tactics and battlefield doctrine seemed poor, even amateurish. These could be low quality troops, the vampire equivalent of conscripts, but after a moment of though, I realized that it wouldn't be unreasonable for even the best vampire soldiers to be extremely skilled at fighting, yet have a childish grasp if infantry tactics.

It was, in short, World War One. Military doctrine, in general, only advances when circumstances force it to; WWI was a bloodbath in large part because it was an industrial war being fought with Napoleonic methods. It took years to charge, for the German Stormtroopers and the British tanks to appear on the field.

I suppose I'd guess the vamps were the same way. Cursed Gear had been invented less than a decade ago, and the vampires in the series acted like there wasn't much else that could hurt them effectively. If they won every fight with raw power, why bother with skill?

"This may not be the time or the place for that." Seylaifeil said, sounding bemused. "We are in a war zone, and- No."

"What?" I muttered suddenly on alert.

"It's a Noble." Seylaifeil whispered. "A strong one."

I caught sight of the approaching noble just as she finished speaking.

The elite vampire was a tall, stately woman, approaching down the street to my right. She had long perfectly straight hair, jet black or extremely deep blue in color. She seemed to wear the bone-white robe of a Noble more like a gown or kimono, and as I watched, she withdrew a black metal rod around three and a half feet long from a sling on her back and held it in her right hand.

"My glaive." Her voice was surprisingly lacking in unpleasantness, though the metal tendril that grew out of the weapon several inches above her hand and arched back to sink into the back of her hand was a bit unsettling.

As the metal pierced her skin, the top of her staff seemed to shimmer for a moment. Then the shimmer moved upwards, leaving a gleaming blade of bright red steel behind it. Within a second, the overall length of the weapon had nearly doubled, the curved tip of the blade reaching well above the vampire's head.

"I am Morrigan Pendragon of the Thirteenth Progenitor." She declared, stopping a few ex-building lengths away from me. "I suppose you must prepare yourself for death."

"This is bad." Seylaifeil said, an unfamiliar edge of panic creeping into her voice. "We aren't ready to face a noble. Not even close. But we wouldn't have a chance of escaping... Try stalling for time. Miracles happen now and again."

I took a deep breath.

"You're all doomed, you know." I shouted, trying to purge my voice of fear.

"Is this some human bravado?" Morrigan responded. "I doubt you could assume your victory to be a forgone conclusion."

"Oh, I'm probably going to die horribly." I responded, feeling a flicker of... something in my chest. Probably just brain damage. "I'd say you have a good chance of butchering everyone in this city. But that's not it at all."

"Oh?" Morrigan said, tilting her head. "What is it, then?"

"There are a lot of facets to it. Psychology, sociology, even philosophy." I grined, slightly. "But at its heart, your problem is economics. People respond to incentives, and that is the heart of your problem."

The tip of her glaive dropped slightly. "Explain."

"In short, you are almost entirely dependent on fresh captives to maintain the productive human populations in your cities." I said. "Birthrate is pretty much zero. Demographics are part of your problem, but the bigger challenge is that you've created an large population with nothing to live for. A population with nothing to live for and no hope for the future will tend to have a very low birthrate. The Soviet Union taught us that."

I saw something on her face, and decided to roll the dice. "Despite your best efforts, suicide is rampant, and that isn't even touching on the random murders. Plus, a sufficiently powerful vampire, let's say Ferid Bathory, can and will drink blood directly from captives. You would know better than I would how likely that is to result in a death, but it can't help."

"As I understand it, humans can replace themselves."

"While you'd be technically correct, the devil is always in the details." I wasn't sure what benefit stalling could really have, but I was on a roll now.

I was almost glad I had to chance to die with this sort of witty aplomb; I could very well matter more dying here and delaying this Noble than I ever could have back home.

Besides, there are worse ways to go than being shanked by a regrettably attractive vampire noble after lecturing her on why her entire species sucks.

"See, there are some species don't do very well thrive in confinement, and with a few, it's simply impossible to maintain a captive population. Humans are interesting, because under the right conditions we can be almost anything. But you certainly haven't created a population that will want to perpetuate itself."

She said nothing.

"Even if you can overcome all the messy logistics issues in getting yourselves a supply of juvenile bloodbags, it takes a long time for them to grow to the point where they can fend for themselves. Who's going to get them there? I think the average vampire is perfectly equipped with the skills and temperament for that task, don't you?"

"It seems like such a little thing, really." I shrugged. "But in the end, it seems like it's always the small things that make all the difference."

"You seem different." The vampire muttered, narrowing her eyes. "Defend yourself."

Then she sprang into motion.

As she closed on me with incredible speed, I let lose a pair of _terminator line_ shots, then sprang to the side.

" _furnace blade_." I muttered, clenching my right hand into a fist.

As the vampire parried both of my shots with her blade, a sword appeared around my hand. It seemed to be composed of blue-white flames rushing away from my hand, fastest down the blade, but with a wide flare forming a handguard and pomel.

"The point is, you're going to run out of people to eat at some point or another." I raised my sword to a guard position, consciously stopping myself from wondering why I knew what that was. "You can't let human society recover to restore the population, because then we _would_ come gunning for you. But your own arrogance means you can't keep a slave population."

Morrigan swung her glaive in a wide horizontal swing. I blocked it, and the shock nearly made my arm go numb, but I was able to recover quickly enough to parry her second strike.

"And they say Pride goes before the fall."

I blocked her next attack, stepping back as I did so.

The vampire noble continued her offensive. I held her off, barely, though I lost ground steadily. About fifteen seconds after her first attack, I realized that she was playing with me. I should have died nearly instantly. I needed to figure something out.

As the vampire came at me with a high overhand strike, I blocked. The moment before her blade connected, I held out my off hand.

" _dying stars_." I shouted the... whatever it was, holding my fingers such that the filaments would, hopefully, be much more tightly grouped.

Morrigan's eyes widened in the fraction of an instant before the barrage struck. She began to leap back, but the streams of light struck just as she was leaving the ground, fouling the jump and knocking her off balance.

As she tried to recover, I charged, noting that while she was trailing smoke from upwards of twenty spots across her body, she was very much not at all dead, or even mildly perforated. I attacked, a simple straight thrust. No time for theatrics.

To be perfectly honest, I have absolutely no idea what happened next. Everything seemed to blur, and then I was sliding backwards across the ground. My armor stopped me from having my skin burned off, but it was still unpleasant.

I came to rest against a peice of concrete the size of a small car, which conveniently propped me up in a sitting position. Morrigan was standing a short distance away, the tip of her weapon held uncomfortable close to my face.

"I honestly did not expect to meet a kindred spirit on the battlefield." She said, the tone of her voice somewhat changed. "I have reached similar conclusions myself, though few concur. To my knowledge, I am the only Noble to have stooped so low as to study the livestock science of economics, and few of your people consider such things worth considering in this world."

"I'd imagine so. But then, time builds habits, and human blood has always been plentiful." I shrugged. "I'd imagine immortality begins rather strong habits."

Morrigan took a step forward, moving the tip of her glaive within a hair of my nose. Confidence, I suddenly felt the need to sneeze.

"Join me." Morrigan said. "This city will fall, but you don't have to die with it. Though most find it distasteful, I have recently begun to believe that my species requires new blood to survive. Together, we can save both our races. Together, we can become the progenitors of a new world order."

It was tempting. It really was. No one wants to die, and immortality alone would be pretty cool. I had already lost anyone I could worry about outliving, or that I might risk hurting. But the jackpot, the guaranteed position of safety in a largely unknown world... It was a very good offer.

But it would be wrong. I would become a monster, subsisting off the life of others. Even if I started with good intentions, even if I could resist the temptations of vampiric pride and decadence, it would be wrong.

Until that point, my life had been fairly easy, and it may have been the hardest decision I ever made, but I managed, somehow. I looked up at the vampire noble.

"Are you coming on to me?"

I tried to sound as honest, as serious, as possible. I mixed a hint of idiot in, just for good measure.

Morrigan stumbled backwards, eyes widening. "What... Are... Why... But... I..."

Unexpected.

"Well then," The vampire said, recovering her compose, mostly, "I am needed elsewhere. Die well, human."

Morrigan turned and jumped away, still slightly trailing smoke. I blinked a few times, then let out a long breath.

"I didn't actually expect you to survive that." Seylaifeil said bluntly.

"Well, thank you for the vote of confidence."

"If you consider-"

Seylaifeil was cut off by a series of deafening cracks. I glanced up just in time to see a formation of eight fighter jets arrayed in a wide 'V' shape shoot overhead. Just after I saw them, several small objects detached from each aircraft and tumbled out of sight behind the city wall. A series of low, rolling explosions drowned out all other sounds for a few seconds, then smoke began to rise from somewhere over the wall.

I tilted my head back, resting it on the block of concrete. With the adrenaline fading, I was quickly realizing exactly how exhausted I was. I hadn't really noticed it in the heat of the moment, but With a chance to think, I realized that several things didn't seem to make sense. First of all, I had been able to handle myself, somewhat, handle myself in a fight. I didn't have any sort of combat training, but Seylaifeil had mentioned something about-

"Yeah, I added some general combat ability in there." She said. "I had to burn some other things to make it fit in properly, but-"

"What did you burn?" I muttered, the fact that I had so little reaction worrying more than her statement itself, which then-

"It was nothing important." Seylaifeil said. "I mean, all those music classes you had to take in elementary school... well, after I was done, if your childhood really had been like that, your psychiatrist would be a rich man."

"And having retroactively lived it _won't_ have that effect?"

"Probably." I got the distinct impression of a shrug. "You won't have any associative or somatic reinforcement, so I don't think it could be _that_ bad."

I put my fingers on my temples. With my gauntlets on, it felt a bit odd, though that feeling was overshadowed by the realization that I had nearly forgotten about my armor. I felt it even less than most normal clothes, and wearing it felt somehow _right_.

I wasn't really sure how much more I wanted to think about this.

"Also, what about those fighter jets?" I asked, changing the subject. "I don't recall there being any of those in the story."

"Well, I only know as much as you do about _why_ , but I got a better look at them. The airframe looked like an F-22, but with a lot of modifications." Seylaifeil paused for a moment. "The Roundels were US Navy."

"But... That doesn't make any sense."

"But it's the truth." I got the impression of another shrug. "Perhaps your outside information isn't completely reliable."

I looked down. That knowledge had been the one major leg up I had in this world; the powers granted by the ring, while formidable, didn't seem to stack up with a Vampire Noble or a Black Demon-Series weapon; with my luck, they probably wouldn't get me anything other than an all-expense-paid trip to the Japanese Imperial Demon Army Super Fun Torture Labs.

"Don't forget the Kingmaker Scenario." Seylaifeil said. "The Demon Army is far from monolithic. By working with one faction, there is a chance you could ensure that you are on the winning side."

"I suppose. I guess being on the right side-" I stopped.

A strange sound filled the air, something like a rapid, rhythmic tapping of metal on cloth-wrapped stone.

"We've got company." Seylaifeil announced. "Four, closing fast."

I sprang to my feet and turned to face the source of the sound, which was somewhere on the other side of the concrete block I had been leaning on. When the four approaching contacts came into sight, I received final confirmation that this world was not as I had expected it.

Each of the approaching soldiers resembled a knight in armor, if that armor was powered tactical plate mail designed for future special forces. It was the same jet black as their mounts, with the exception of a bright, featureless faceplate.

In the place of lances, they carried a variety of rather large firearms somewhat bulkier than I would have expected for the size, each weapon complete with an array of glowing Tron Lines. Shoulder-mounted weapons designed along similar lines rounded out their weapons loadout.

Of course, the most obvious thing was that, in place of an armored warhorse, each man rode a massive obsidian robotic spider.

The spiders were immense, easily the size of a small car, which did nothing to diminish their sleek, dangerous appearance. There legs, far from the spindly affairs of normal spiders, were thick, armored appendages, each ending in a complex foot. They moved with an easy, predatory grace completely at odds with their almost cyberpunk aesthetic.

However, as I took a closer look, I realized they weren't, technically speaking, spiders. I counted sixteen legs on each thing, divided into groups on each of the four 'corners' of the entity. Furthermore, the legs never rose above the level of their mountings, and resembled those of a large mammal more than anything else.

The spider-knights closed on me shockingly quickly. As they came within a hundred feet of me, the leader held up his hand in the universal 'halt' signal. He held still as his unit stopped behind him. A few seconds passed.

Then he raised his massive weapon and leveled it at my chest. I glanced down at my breastplate. What the hell. I was on a roll.

"You know, the laser sight dot doesn't really work if you're standing right in front of me." I said mildly.

"Who are you, and what is your allegiance?" The lead knight declared. "Answer quickly, or I will _end_ you."

The pitch of the knight's voice was somewhat low, but unmistakably female. Huh.

A second knight moved up next to the leader and turned toward her. "Sir, I just got off the horn with _Virginia_ , and they said the JIDA has finally agreed we need the big guns."

He glanced at me. "Who's that guy? He's putting off way too much IR too be a vamp, and for _some strange reason_ I don't think he's a horseman."

"He could be a spy and a traitor." The leader shot back.

"A spy for who, exactly?" The second soldier responded, gesturing with his large tri-barreled cannon. "I saw him kill like fourteen vampires on one of the drone feeds."

He paused for a moment. "I know! Maybe he's working for a post-apocalyptic street gang! He's good way better kit than I'd expect, but I'm sure we can win him over.

He looked at me. "Hey. Great work on those vampires. We could use someone with those sort of skills on our crew. We've got bacon, air conditioning, bacon, and running water. You want in?"

"What are you doing?" The commander demanded. "You think that-"

"Yeah, sure." I said. "It's dangerous to go alone, after all. What's the current situation?"

"Vampire airmobile units have landed in the south and southwestern sectors, but they are isolated and mostly contained, at least for the time being." A third soldier said.

This one also sounded female, though her armored silhouette was shorter and slimmer than any of her comrades.

"The west wall was breached less than thirty minutes ago, and the breach was seized by two reinforced vampire assault companies. The _Enterprise_ air wing engaged and destroyed follow-on forces, but more are likely approaching."

"Thanks, Sara." The commander muttered, then turned to the seconded soldier to have spoken. "Virgil, grab the unknown. We're moving to reinforce the JIDA units engaging the vampire command unit."

I wasn't sure what that meant. Unless Virgil was telekinetic, there was no way he could touch anything on the ground from his position on his mount.

What came next, and for at least a few minutes thereafter, was rather unpleasant. Oddly, it was even more terrifying than facing down Morrigan; that had been a sort of acute, primal fear.

Being picked up by two giant robotic spider legs, and then carried five feet above the pavement as said spider proceed to take off at speeds that would have put the best racehorses in the world to shame. Not only was I in an immediate, primal panic mode, but I also had time to _think_ about it. I had no idea how the spider was even holding me, but I could feel the wind rushing past me. Drag force is a product of the square of relative velocity, and the human body has a terrible coefficient of drag, so... Yeah.

Eventually, it stopped. Vergil's spider dropped me on the ground. I lay there for a few seconds, then stood up. I wasn't dizzy, given the relative lack of rotational motion, but I had been holding my breath longer than most physicians consider 'healthy'.

Apparently, we were standing on the roof of a five or six story building, overlooking a large open space. It was impossible to say what the space had originally been, as it had been fairly thoroughly destroyed. Yūichirō, with his single massive, oily wing shedding drops of pitch-black fluid, seemed to be a leading contributor to this destruction.

Shit. Yu had gone Seraph. I looked closer, and I could see the other members of his squad. Kimizuki was sprawled on his stomach, uniform torn to expose his neck. Shinoa was crumpled against a collapsed wall, a dark stain spreading across the left collar of her uniform. Mitsuba was lying on her back, one arm over her chest, a partial imitation of a pharaoh's burial pose. Yoichi, propped up against a wall, appeared conscious, but was clearly immobile.

From my position, I could see the Demon Army main forces assembled in a broad half-circle around the battlefield with glittering demon weapons at the ready, most bedecked in pristine black and green uniforms.

However, there were also solider in the arc in what I would have more readily recognized as battle dress; full body suits of articulated futuristic battleplate. Their armor was primarily colored a deep crimson. Too rich to be called blood red, perhaps the uniform of an Imperial British Infantryman would share the color after a long campaign. Silver, the dull shade of a denarius minted long before the birth of Christ, featured prominently as a secondary color and highlight.

These men carried more familiar weapons, mostly assault rifles with a few of the glowing lines featured on the armaments of the spider knights. Their formations seemed to be more concentrated than those of the JIDA squads, and slightly further away from the central conflict.

I watched, moments later, as Shinoa leapt to her feet, embracing a berserk Yu and somehow dragging him back to his senses, his wing vanishing and his face returning to normal.

" _Virginia_ says splash in fifteen seconds, Time On Target four." Vergil announced. "Shields up."

"I'm reinforcing your armor." Seylaifeil said.

I stepped behind Vergil's spider. Seylaifeil sounded nervous, and I wasn't sure I wanted to meet anything that could unnerve her. I didn't know-

The world ended. Rather than hearing it, I _felt_ the sound just a moment before the blast wave arrived. The shock front washed over me like a tsunami, and I was barely able to keep myself on my feet. The storm of light unleashed by the barrage over the focal point of the vampire forces was like watching solid lighting, utterly different than any other explosion I had seen.

Taken together, the effect was awesome. Not the weak, diluted way most people think of when they say the world, but in the literal sense; stunning the observer with an amazing, overwhelming awe.

It took me a moment to realize that the odd tickling sensation in my ears was Seylaifeil's Cauterization ability repairing my hearing.

"Soldiers of the Republic." The spider squad leader declared, mere seconds after the shock wave passed. "By the Ars Machina, the souls of our weapons, let us cleanse this city of these abominations!"

Perhaps I had been too distracted by one thing or another to notice it, but each of the knights and their spiders emitted a sort of ethereal glow, much like what I had seen in connection with the power Seylaifeil had granted me, which began to grow stronger as the leader spoke.

Then she raised her weapon and pointed it forward. A pair of machine guns on the head of her spider began spitting fire as her mount charged forwards and leapt off the edge of the building. Her squadmates followed in short order, each vanishing into the cloud of dust.

"You aren't the sort of man who would be happy living to a ripe old age, right?" Seylaifeil interjected.

"Wait, why-"

"I thought so." She said. "Good."

"I don't think-"

A wave of fire swept down from my head, tracing along what felt like every nerve of my body. I felt a slight weight appear on the backs of my thighs, and a pleasant warmth gather across my shoulder blades.

"I think I'm starting to get a better idea of how to alloy my power with you." Seylaifeil said. "But you... Might want to get some serious practice in if you want to try this again. Our bond is new enough that it's fairly plastic. Once that expires, I'm not sure how long it will be before you can do this again."

I glanced backwards. Attached to each of my thighs was what looked like a miniature fighter jet sans cockpit, complete with ailerons and thrust vectoring plates, nose facing the sky. It looked oddly like a TSF jump unit, actually.

It only took Seylaifeil a few moments to explain what I had to do. It seemed foolish, but I didn't see any way to access the interior of the building from the roof, so short of cutting my down through the structure, it was my only way down.

I walked to the center of the roof, then activated my Jump Units as I charged towards the edge. I certainly felt decreasingly heavy as I ran, but three steps from the edge, when I was beginning to worry it wouldn't work, the warmth in my back exploded.

And I rose into the air on wings of light.

Only glimpses of those wings were visible to me, but after the battle I learned that my wings resembled of a filigree of molten gold suspended in the air, forming an intricate pattern in three dimensions extending for nearly a dozen feet on either side of me.

Surveying the battlefield from the air, I saw that the cloud of dust created by the battleship barrage, for that was the only thing it could have been, was clearing quickly, revealing a disturbing number of vampires who had clearly survived the blast without suffering fatal injuries. Dozens of discarded vampire weapons scattered across the ground indicated many of the undead had been slain, but the strike was far from the deathblow it would have been against a human force.

The battle had developed into a melee, five man squads of JIDA warriors maneuvering in open formations against the larger bands of vampires. The soldiers in red formed a smaller number of larger formations, men in ranks laying down a hail of automatic fire, holding the vampires at bay.

I spotted a pair of Demon Army soldiers somewhat separated from any other human units. A large band of vampires cut them off from the main body of the JIDA force, and a large band of vamps was in the process of surrounding them.

Wobbling in the air as I turned towards the pair, I held out my left arm in an attempt to maintain stability, I began firing terminator lines from my right hand. I scored a few hits with the beams of light, but the movement to aim them cost me any stability I had, and I tumbled into one of the vampire soldiers.

He seemed almost as surprised at this turn of events as I was, but was still gracious enough to cushion my landing. The vampire dropped his weapon as I impacted, and I managed to get on top as we went to ground. As we skidded to a stop, I raised my fist to strike.

I would like to point out that I have no particular skill with hand-to-hand combat. However, at that moment, I learned that there are certain circumstances under which, if you are wrapped in an inch of ultrastrong enchanted powered metal and your opponent is not, skill becomes irrelevant.

I ended that monster, then stood to continue to fight.

And that was what I did, fighting and killing in a whirlwind of light to the slow, apocalyptic tempo of the _Virginia's_ big guns. I don't believe I was in full control of myself anymore at that point; even in the lulls of the battle, I felt a massive pressure driving me forward, a physical pressure in my limbs as much as a mental drive. It was like standing under a bolt of lightning, trying to hold it away from the ground.

But once I actually closed to engage the enemy... I'm not really sure what happened. Each of the high-intensity fights were holes in my memory.

Eventually, I could feel the atmosphere of the battle shift. Moments later, Vampire units began to break off from the fight and retreat. Their heavy infantry disengaged first, moving backwards in coordinated units of up to a dozen. The human forces surged, the demon army squads charging forward while the soldiers in red broke their volley line and began advancing in leapfrogging platoons.

The Nobility retreated next, most of them launching a flurry of vicious attacks, and then flinging themselves into supernaturally powerful jumps that carried them clear of the Demon Army squads engaging them in CQC. A few nobles who happened to be close to the groups of armored soldiers were shot down mid-leap by a fusillades of flickering razor-straight silver lighting, but most landed and dashed inside buildings or behind rubble piles and out of sight.

More than a few of the Vampires, those with plain grey robes and mundane weapons, didn't retreat at all. They held for a moment, but as the blazing fury drove me to charge forward, Demon Army soldiers breached their line in a dozen places amid clouds of ash.

That didn't concern me. I charged half a dozen blocks from the battle line, fire in my eyes, in search of blood. It was all that really mattered to me at that stage, and a distant part of me was somewhat uncomfortable with that.

I crashed through an intact door and into one of the areas that had received the tender ministrations of _Virginia_ 's guns. The front wall of the building had survived, though everything else was gone. An area three blocks on a side had been leveled, and there was little ground outside the blast craters not covered in rubble. I stopped, surveying the beautiful desolation, trying to force the idea that I was advancing too far beyond the main force though my head.

My eyes caught a flicker of motion.

Raising my _furnace blade_ to a guard position, I began to move toward it. There was a figure half-buried under the rubble, a figure in bone-white robes stained dark red. As I came within a few paces, the face of the figure turned, or perhaps rolled, to look at me.

It was Morrigan.

A wave of confusion rolled over my mind, displacing the inferno of fury in an instant. Everything hurt, and I suddenly realized just how tired I was.

Tired and so very cold.

Shaking my head and trying to focus, I took a step toward the pinned Vampire Lady. She lay in a pool of blood, her left arm and left leg gone, and her right limbs covered by a concrete slab. Her eyes focused for a moment and it her lips separated, but then her face went slack.

I suppose she wanted me to kill her.

As I lowered my blade to the concrete slab, I told myself I wasn't giving her that mercy.

The concrete covering her chest crumbled easily, but a reinforcing beam ran across the Vampire's elbow and thigh, and it was apparently beyond my remaining strength to cut it.

Steeling myself, I cut both her remaining limbs at the shoulder, something inside me finding the fact that I'd find _this_ unpleasant hilariously ironic.

Staggering as I pulled the torso free, I picked up the vampire torso and began walking back towards the human lines. I had barely made it out of the building when I was spotted by a band of the soldiers in red, who appeared to be guarding the landing site for some kind of VTOL dropship.

As the craft touched down and its assault ramp dropped, ranks of soldiers in slightly different crimson armor advanced out. They disembarked and took up combat positions quickly, and as the original unit began to embark, I started walking toward them. Several of the new arrivals leveled weapons at me, but one of the soldiers in the other group said something, and they stood down.

The original group boarded, and I walked up the ramp behind them, attracting more nobs of appreciation and thumbs up than the odd looks I expected. There were plenty of empty seats on the dropship.

I really hoped that didn't mean the obvious.

I propped Morrigan the 'armless vampire up on one of the empty seats and sat down next to her. She appeared to be comatose, and I was reasonably sure vampires couldn't regrow limbs fast enough for her to be a threat in any reasonable time scale.

As the assault ramp began to return to its raised position, one of the soldiers sat down across from me and removed her helmet. I noticed something about her face seemed odd; maybe it was the lines of light that periodically appeared to drift across her skin.

"That could have gotten pretty bad." She said. "But the plan worked out fine. I guess I should thank you for doing your part too; you did a lot of damage out there."

I muttered something indistinct. I wasn't really sure what I could say anymore.

The soldier tilted her head toward the torso on the seat next to me. "So... Spoils of war?"

She may have said that a bit too eagerly. Maybe.

"I had a chance to grab a Noble, so I did." I said, vaguely aware of something. "Could be useful for intelligence or research. If not, we could always feed her into the incinerator later, so there's no real chance of loss."

The armored girl raised her hand to cover a laugh, and as she did so, I saw something.

The Eagle, Globe, and Anchor.

"You're Marines?" I muttered. "American?"

"Yeah." She said. "USEFMC. Only Marines left, as far as we know."

"Please... Don't give this prisoner to the Demon Army." I said. "I think she could be used for better things than a new Demon Weapon. Promise..."

"I'll do what I can, but I'm only a Captain." She said. "I'm not sure-"

"Just..."

Then I did the reasonable thing, and passed out.

[x]

I woke up under an unfamiliar ceiling.

That wasn't a surprise. What _was_ surprising was that I felt fine, if slightly stiff from a long rest, but fine.

"Welcome back to the world of the living." A somewhat deep but clearly female voice said. "Or one we're contesting, at any rate."

I sat up and looked at the speaker. It took me a moment to place her short brown hair blue eyes, and the subtle but inexplicably _odd_ look of her skin. She was the Marine Captain from... Before I passed out.

"You were out for two days, so it's past time you got out of bed." She said, walking toward the curtain-covered window. "We've got a world to save. Doctor Valentine took an interest in your case, so your bloodsucker body pillow is still alive. Unfortunately for you, that means Doctor Valentine now knows who you are, which is something most of us try to avoid is."

I stood up and walked up to the window next to her, marveling at my apparent recovery. I would need to get answers, information to work with before I could proceed.

"I'm Fealty, by the way." She said. "Captain Fealty Kranz. I'm guessing you're not from around here."

With that, she threw open the curtains, and I was looking down on a cityscape of glass, stone, and steel. It was laid out in a neat grid pattern, with wide streets and ongoing construction everywhere I looked.

"Welcome to New Constantinople."

 **[]**

 **So this is a thing now. The next chapters won't be as... Messy... And we might even find out what's going on. Leave a review, by order of the Inquisition.**


	2. Chapter 2

I sat in the hospital lobby, idly flicking at a hologram hanging in the air in front of me. Fealty had left the room soon after I'd woken up, saying she needed to report to her CO. A nurse had shown up moments later and evicted me, shouting something about how hospitals weren't spa resorts and turning over the room.

The lobby was fairly empty, with only a few other people sitting at the various chairs and tables waiting for something. The front wall was made largely of glass in a dark steel frame, but despite its incredible clarity, I could tell the glass was well over an inch thick, and the lobby itself struck me as reminiscent of a castle bailey, an enclosed killing field.

Fealty had left me a change of clothes and a small grey box with a few cable jacks and blinking lights. The small instruction card said that it was called a Mobile, and with the right accessories, it could provide the functions of a desktop, laptop, cell phone, or microwave oven.

I _really_ hoped that last one was a joke.

Currently, I was using a holographic display to look though a few USEF databases I had been given access to, and annotating a map of Japan with candy-colored arrows and virtual pins.

The United States Exile Forces, USEF, had been born from the United States Forces Japan, and other PACOM commands, all of which had been trapped on the wrong side of the Pacific when the world ended.

It all started with Vice Admiral Jack Hornmeyer. He had been a member of a large but dispersed organization of spellcasters with strong ties to the Navy and Marine Corps. As a result, he was able to gain several months advanced warning of the Apocalypse Virus, but he could not procure any evidence to prompt official government action. The article said that it was probably due to the fact that the prediction was purely magical in origin, but one of the footnotes mentioned that it could also have been related to vampire infiltration of the government.

However, Hornmeyer resources at his disposal, both official and personal. The U.S. Forces Japan had swelled to over half a million officers and enlisted due to the growing threat posed by China in the opening years of the a variety of methods that would have made his Judge Advocate General gag were he not complicit, Hornmeyer led Washington to convince itself that threat had become much greater than it truly was, and that tensions in East Asia would soon come to a head.

The ruse would likely only have held for little more than a year, but that was far more time than the world that would care about such things had left.

As the size of the forces under his command tripled, Hornmeyer and his _ad hoc_ cabal worked feverishly move dependents and civilian contractors into their sphere of influence. They had developed a countermeasure to the Apocalypse Virus, and while most who received it described the following period of time as the worst twenty-four hours of their lives, the general consensus was that it beat hemorrhaging to death along with the rest of the modern world.

Hornmeyer organized for the vaccine to be distributed to U.S. Military installations around the world, but he still faced a major problem; the vampires. Their Eldritch defenses made them difficult to fight with conventional weapons, and it was fairly clear that the USFJ would not have the resources to overcome that disadvantage.

An answer was found in the form of the _Ars Machina_. Hornmeyer and his associates had been dabbling with the concept for more than twenty years, but several breakthroughs born in the desperation in those months led to the codification of the Arts. The name Valentine was mentioned repeatedly in connection with these developments.

I didn't understand all of the specifics, but it appeared that the _Ars Machina_ was based around summoning an entity called a Machine Spirit and binding it to an item of high technology to form something called an artifact. The details were much more complicated, but I suppose that's true of almost everything. There were also a number of interesting footnotes, including one which proposed that the Machine Spirits didn't actually exist before being summoned, though it referenced a lot of things I had no knowledge of.

Massive levels of supply were build up at Fleet Activities Yokosuka in the weeks before the end of the world. When the deaths started, the USFJ sprang into motion. The Marine contingent, a significant portion of the entire Corps and one of the first units to be equipped with artifact armor and weaponry, moved out to assume forward defensive positions. Meanwhile, the warships which had been instilled with Machine Spirits set sail for U.S. and allied facilities across the Pacific, escorting convoys of 'transport' ships to evacuate everyone they could.

It was fascinating. The battles that followed, even a mere eight years later, had already become the stuff of legend. The Storming of Yokosuka, the Okinawa Airlift, the Siege of Mt. Ogusu, the Guam Retreat, Jinmuji Salient, the Busan Reversal...

Even in the first seventy-two hours of the new world, as darkness began to engulf everything, the flames of heroism and greatness had begun to shine as they never truly could in a safe, stable world.

I'm sure there's something profound to be said about that, but I really aren't philosophy good.

Eventually, an increasing number of rescued survivors, combined with a lack of infrastructure compatible with the _Ars Machina_ prompted the USFJ to relocate across Tokyo Bay to the less-developed Boso Peninsula. Layers of fortifications were built across the northern border of the Peninsula, and one month after the world ended, Vice Admiral Hornmeyer convened the conclave which founded the USEF and drafted its Warrant of Order, and ground was broken on New Constantinople.

I tilted my head. It seemed like the article was something of an info dump, though I actually find myself enjoying those on occasion. Checking the notes on the article, I realized that was exactly what it was; a primer for new arrivals, rescued survivors and the like.

Glancing back at my annotated map, I frowned. It now resembled a plate of Technicolor spaghetti.

"What are you doing?"

I looked up at the speaker. He was a young man, probably in his mid-twenties. He had a bright smile, sparkling blue eyes, and would have perfectly fit the part of the All-American Boy if it weren't for his gunmetal grey hair.

"It's just a..." I trail off as I realized he had already opened up a copy of my map in the air in front of him.

"Is this what I think it is?" He asked, an edge of excitement in his voice.

"It's just something I've been putting together in my spare time." I said, spitting out the first plausible explanation that came to mind.

"If you can plan a Reconquista like this in your spare time, I'd love to see what you do for a living." He tapped a few symbols on his wrist. "Privacy field. I'm Colonel Maxime Tindall Robichaux, of the 7th Marine Expeditionary Brigade. Although everyone calls me Max, and everyone calls my formation the Legio Alera. Nice to meet you."

I was speechless for a moment. This guy was actually _important_.

"So what is this? Some of the notes and explanations are a bit..." Max trailed off.

"Shorthand?" I offered.

"Yeah. I have nothing against it, but it's not the _official_ gibberish shorthand." Max smiled, and I chuckled. "So what is it?"

"It's a plan to capture the main islands of Japan." I began. "The core of it is basic asymmetric tactics combined with German 1940 concepts, with a U.S. Korean War twist."

Max looked interested. "How do you mean?"

I took a deep breath, suddenly some nervous. "First, we would pick one of the smaller Home Islands. Shikoku is the smallest, so that might be the best, but I'm not sure I have the information to make that call. Anyway, once we pick a target, we begin hit-and-run raiding and ambush tactics on the vampires."

Max frowned.

"That's where the Blitzkrieg doctrine comes in." I said. "In 1940, the Wehrmacht actually had fewer tanks than the French and British, and most of its formations were barely mechanized. Most of their supply train was still based around horses. However, the common perception is that the elite mechanized Nazi Army overwhelmed the antiquated French."

I raised my hand and clenched it into a fist. "That's because they concentrated. They organized the best they had into the panzer divisions, and used them to punch through the French line."

I always respect a man who knows his history." Max said mildly.

"So we do the same thing. We take some of our best troops, hopefully lots of those spider things, and organize them into Mobile Strike Companies. Two hundred and fifty men, shot on mobile logistics and heavy on combat power, especially alpha strike ability. Our aircraft, drones, and scouts pick out targets, and they hit them, hard, then retreat into the wilderness, concrete or otherwise. The short distances in this theater cover for the lack of supply, while still allowing them to remain mobile"

The corners of Colonel Robichaux's mouth began to creep upward.

"But this is where the Korean War bit comes it. To actually take ground, we can't just poke the vampires, we have to _hurt_ them. So instead of disappearing, we let the vamps follow some of the Mobile Strike Companies. We let them follow our people right back to prepared positions garrisoned by units of lower quality, and with mortars dialed in and bombers on station. The MSC can use the positions, along with the garrisons, to hold the vampires in place for our firepower to tear them apart."

"Kid, I think you need to come back to my office." Max said. "I need to call the Brass, but this could be the start of a long and beautiful friendship."

[x]

"Well Mark, the higher-ups said I could have you." Max said, leaning back in his chair. "You'll be commissioned into the 7th Brigade as a Lieutenant. The official story is that we found you out in one of the ruined cities; that happens often enough that it won't raise any eyebrows. In light of you're rather... Unique... Capabilities, I'm starting you at a salary of four thousand Warnotes a week, with a fifty thousand signing bonus."

"Is that a lot?" I asked.

"It's like four times what a normal infantryman makes." Max said. "Once you have two or three months of demonstrated consistency, you could get a pretty good deal to buy a plot of land on mortgage, which is actually the majority of the cost of almost any freestanding residence nowadays. Of course, I'm giving you room and board here at Fort Jefferson, so I'm not sure why you'd want to do that."

"Thanks for that, by the way." I said.

Max waved his hand dismissively. "What sort of military does not house its soldiers? Besides, it makes it easier for me to keep an eye on you."

He paused, a mockingly serious expression on his face. "Uh... Forget I said that."

"It's fine. I'd keep an eye on me too." I said automatically glancing at the fingers of my right hand.

"I've already had all your stuff sent to your room, but I don't think Housekeeping has actually set up the furniture. Dr. Valentine has that Vampire you grabbed locked up in her lair in the basement, so you could go take a look at her if you want to kill some time." He frowned. "You might want to stop by the JAG office and set up a will, though. Its right on the way, and Valentine is _insane_."

[x]

I felt like I was falling as the elevator to Dr. Valentine's Inner Sanctum accelerated. Entering had required a handprint check and a retinal scan, and a short wait that felt long enough to be a manual authorization.

The elevator itself was surprisingly large, easily the size of a two-car garage. If it was used to supply the lab below, that would make sense. The doors had also been unusually thick, like something you'd expect to see on a bank vault or an ordnance magazine.

That seemed foreboding.

A few long moments later, the elevator began to decelerate. It did so fast enough that I felt heavier, but not to the insane degree of its starting acceleration.

The elevator came to a stop, touching down like a feather. The vault doors slid open with a hiss of equalizing pressure, revealing the hallway beyond.

I stepped out of the elevator, looking around. Rather than the utilitarian furnishings of Fort Jefferson above, this hallway was dimly lit, with walls, floor, and ceiling of raw dark grey steel, which appeared to be colored for maximum intimidation.

The hall was short, with another set of armored bulkheads at the end. These opened as I approached, revealing... not what I was expecting.

The space beyond was well lit, for one, with pristine white walls crisscrossed by bundles of cables. It was quite large, and long tables lined the walls, with more were arranged in parallel in about a third of the space. Random hardware filled much of the remaining space, a strange mix of familiar furnishings, scientific equipment, and heavy machinery. I saw both a gothic four-post bed and a large hammock, what appeared to be a series of cascading centrifuges, and a tall cylinder whose label declared it to be liquid nitrogen on tap.

"I was wondering when you'd show up."

The voice was confident, feminine, and surprisingly warm. I looked up to see a young woman who had to be _barely_ old enough to drink, two or three years older than me at the outside. Her turquoise hair reached nearly to her waist, and also included a standard pair of those drill things, one on either side of her head.

All in all, she was four feet shorter and two horns shy of what I had expected of the apparently infamous Dr. Valentine.

"I suppose it makes sense that an interesting man would bring me such an interesting specimen." She said, folding her arms under her 1σ-2σ breasts. "I've never actually had the chance to poke a noble before."

"Thanks?" I said, still looking around the room. "What do you do down here?"

"Science."

"Well yes. But what kind?"

She tilted her head back. "Arcanatech, and cybernetics, mostly. Though Arcanatech seems to wind up including a little of everything. Anyway, do you want to see your vampire?"

"Alright." I said, still wondering why everyone was so terrified of her. "What was your name again?"

The girl looked at me. It was an odd look, like I was something utterly different from everything else she had ever seen. "I'm Aria Valentine. But who are you, Mark Quirinus?"

"Excellent question." I said. "If I ever figure that out, I'll give you a shout."

Valentine laughed, then turned and began heading for one of the doors, which slid open automatically as she approached.

I looked around as I followed her through the door. This room was much smaller than the other I had seed, and a full quarter of it was occupied by a box of decimeter-thick glass. Several globe-shaped high-volume holoprojectors were mounted on the walls. They activated as we walked in, filling the air

Morrigan the vampire lay inside the box, laying on a elevated foam pad. A robot hung from the ceiling over her; it looked like one robot tarantula had eaten another robot tarantula and there powers had combined to create a _really big_ robot tarantula, which had then been wrapped in wire and sent to medical school.

In any case, the machine hanging or Morrigan had a lot of arms, each one tipped with some sort of medical tool, with at least two or three more in reserve on a rotating rack mounted a few inches above the working tip. Dozens of cables and wires trailed down to Morrigan, connecting to sensors mounted all across her head and chest, a few of which appeared to include subdermal or intramuscular components.

Her limbs were back, but they seemed scrawny and excessively pale, lacking the inherent toning of the rest of her body. Patches connected to black tubes were attached to her limbs in regular intervals.

"She's made a significant recovery, though I've given her six or seven apartments worth of blood, so that's a given." Valentine said, opening a holographic display.

"Okay..." I replied. "Though where did you get... Thirty-plus liters of blood?"

"Hospital, mostly. They usually have a lot" Valentine said. "Quite a bit of it was yours, actually."

Had there been any water on hand, I would have taken a long sip so I could have performed a spit take. "Excuse me?"

"I got the first sample normally, but she displayed an anomalous reaction when I administered it. So I had the medical staff get another five liters or so."

"I was only out for two days, and I doubt I _have_ much more than five liters of blood." I said. "If you had done that, wouldn't I have developed a minor case of the deads?"

"Don't be silly." Seylaifeil said. "Cauterization is a wonderful ability."

I briefly wondered why I hadn't heard from her sooner, but I doubted I would get a straight answer.

"So what kind of anomalous reaction did she demonstrate?" I asked. "And do you have any idea why?"

"Well, I don't know why. Otherwise it would be an exotic reaction, not anomalous." Valentine said, glancing away from her data and looking at me with a frown. "First of all, her core body temperature started rising. Vampires are ectotherms; their bodies don't regulate temperature, though they aren't really affected by it until well outside the range a human could survive."

Valentine tilted her head at the containment box. "I've kept the temperature in there at exactly seventy Fahrenheit. Her core temperature leveled out at eighty more than a day ago. But beyond that, I've noticed a marked increase in Gamma brainwaves, and a couple of other little things."

"Like what?" I muttered, still somewhat perturbed.

"Polarity inversion?" Valentine muttered, flicking through a display. "Huh. It looks like her core temperature started increasing a couple of minutes ago. I wonder if that could be..."

"Out of curiosity, how exactly does one learn Vampiric medicine?" I asked.

Valentine frowned. "Trial and error. No one alive today has done much of it, and what Literature exists is of... dubious quality."

She pointed at Morrigan's arm. "Those patches, for example, are microneedle arrays. I'm using them to administer blood directly to a large area of regenerating tissue. Once I solved the coagulation problem, they seemed to help, but I can't do more than guess at the underlying mechanisms."

Valentine shook her head. "Partially, I think a lot of Vampire medication is 'add blood and wait'. Other than curse purification, I'm not even sure the vampires themselves would develop much more than that."

"So, have you done anything other than add blood?" I asked.

"Mercury." Valentine said.

"I was under the impression that mercury was somewhat toxic." I said. "I don't think anyone who knows what they're doing has actually used it as medicine for at least a century."

Valentine's lips twitched up. "Funny you should mention that. I found references to mercury in relation to vampiric metabolism in a transcript of a text from Han-era China discussing immortality. The sole emperor of the preceding dynasty tried it, though it didn't work out for him. There were other sources from spellcasters in the region scattered over the next millennium and a half."

"Huh." I said. "That's... really weird, though it makes sense, in a way."

"I still don't think I would have bought it, though, but I found some corroborating post-Roman European sources, again discussing vampires, healing, and Immortality, this time in relation to alchemy. The key link was Azoth, the divine flame of transformation in alchemical lore, with a strong thematic association to mercury. I decided that it was more likely that there really was something to those sources than that the same misconception had developed twice, it two completely different cultures with minimal contact, especially between spellcasters."

"So did it do anything?" I asked.

"Probably." Valentine said. "I first administered it about ten hours after she arrived, and two hours after I added your blood to the infusion mix. She was already displaying reactions that I am _reasonably_ sure were caused by your cardiovascular fluid, so by that point, I can no longer identify causality with full certainty. Multiple variables and all that."

"Interesting." I said, frowning. "Is there anything else I might want to know?"

"Actually, there is something I'd like you to do for me." Valentine said. "I originally believed this vampire's unusual reaction to your blood was due to some inherent property of the blood, but her core temperature began rising shortly after you arrived, and has held steady at eighty-five degrees since. Therefore, I think it's possible that the important factor is a thaumaturgic connection provided by the blood, rather than the blood itself."

"So which part is the one that sucks?"

Valentine reached into one of her pockets and withdrew a venipuncture needle and ampule.

[x]

"I have to admit." Seylaifeil said, walking next to me as I walked onto one of the miscellaneous firing ranges on the grounds of Fort Jefferson. "I can't believe you actually went along with that"

"I suspect it was the sort of thing where your response isn't particularly important." I responded. "They just ask to make you feel better."

"I can respect that." Seylaifeil said. "Why are you here, anyway?"

"I need to practice. I can't rely on... Whatever it was you did at the end of that battle."

"Fair enough. Though doing so properly may require a place with... Fewer collaterals to damage"

"Huh." I said.

I was looking around the preparation area situated behind the line of firing cells. There were specific range for all of the standard-issue or common specialist weaponry, so the dozen or so soldiers at the various tables and stands were preparing, inspecting, or cleaning a rather diverse selection of the Reaper's tools.

One man was wearing a heavy suit of powered Artifact armor colored dark red, dull silver, and black. He carried a massive assault rifle, and something about him seemed oddly familiar...

His head swiveled towards me. The helmet of the armor was an angular rendition of a classical warrior's helm, a pair of glowing green eyes under a pointed shield.

"Hey! Mark, isn't it?" Virgil said, reaching up and pulling off his helmet.

It was the same voice as that of the robot spider cavalryman from the Shinjuku battle. It was the first time I had actually seen his face; he had dirty-blonde hair, and his otherwise unremarkable features had a slightly mischievous cast to them.

"Virgil?" I asked. "What are you doing here?"

"Well." He said. "So there I was, killing vampires and shit, then this asshole in gold armor shows up and starts jumping around, shooting _lasers_ everywhere, and then noble stats bugging out, so I chase him. But right before I could start hitting him, a mob of cannon fodder gets routed by the aforementioned golden bastard and they stampede me. I got most of them, but Sleipnir didn't make it."

He had started off in a tone of what felt like exaggerated anger, though I could hear sadness in his voice as he finished.

"Sleipnir?" I asked quietly.

"My Stalker." He said. "They're a lot more than just machines. It's hard to explain, but... yeah. Logistics said they have no idea how long it would be until they could procure a replacement, or if I'd even be able to connect with it. So I requested a transfer to the Mobile Infantry."

"I see." I said. "I'm sorry."

Virgil waved his hand dismissively. "It's a war. You can't really predict or control anything; the best you can do is play the odds, keep an ear to the ground, and be ready for anything. Besides, you did a lot more damage to the other guys. Don't worry about it."

"Thanks." I said. "Though if I were picking a new MOS, I would have gone for that."

"My God." Vergil said, eyes widening as he followed my gaze. "It's beautiful. I suddenly feel like such an idiot. I didn't even know we _had_ those. Did you know we had those?"

I shook my head.

The wonder in question was humanoid in shape, but clearly mechanical, standing well over twice my height. It was colored in the same dark red and dull silver as Virgil's armor with a slightly darker shade of brilliant green eyes, but it seemed much bulkier, built like a tank. Two massive rectangular weapon barrels, each at least four feet long, extended forward from the rounded Eva Fins behind its shoulders. Its right forearm was surrounded by four gattling guns in an 'X' pattern, the muzzles ending just before the wrist, and the left forearm mounted a large circular shield.

It bore an odd resemblance to a Tau XV88 Broadside Battlesuit with more solid leg, but despite that, it moved with a remarkable grace as it walked from its hanger toward an open space beside the firing line.

I looked away; envy would serve no one.

"So, what exactly would I do to train with this power?" I said, glancing at Seylaifeil and trying to distract myself.

"Control, most likely." Seylaifeil said. "In Shinjuku, you never consciously used both aspects of our power at the same time. Two opposing powers bent to the will of a single mind are capable of accomplishing far more than the sum of both independently. There are few ways to annihilate Vampiric Royalty short of imposing the Ultimate Sanction, and the only one you are likely to have at your disposal anytime in the foreseeable future."

"So where do I start?"

Seylaifeil held out her arm, and a pattern of red and blue lines vaguely reminiscent of a knot appeared on the ground.

"Illuminate the blue, and obscure the red." Seylaifeil declared. "I'll be raising the difficulty steadily, so don't get left behind."

[x]

I pressed my hand against the door scanner, stumbling inside as the door slid open.

The training had really sucked.

It would have been hard for me to imagine how bad tracing lines could be, but quite frankly it had been much, much worse. The two powers interacted oddly, resisting any attempt I made to work them together, and reacting completely differently to any attempt I made to control them.

Now, having finished what Seylaifeil told me was one hundred and sixty minutes of that, I was shivering from sympathetic energy negation, my skin actually cold to the touch. My brain felt like it had been petrified, and yet ready to leak out of my skull at the same time.

In the end Robert Jordan had saved the day. For some reason, I had thought back to the two halves of the One Power, and the differences in controlling them. The Aspect of Fire seemed to respond like _Saidin_ , a torrent of power that needed to be seized, overpowered, and commanded. The Aspect of Shadow behaved more like _Saidar_ had been described, flowing around and drowning attempts at direct control, but moving obediently when coaxed passively.

I knew that was still fiction, but at the same time, it made sense from a certain perspective. They were two opposing powers, fire being an active force, while shadow was the passive absence of light. Push and Pull, action and reaction.

There was a state of mind, one of Cognitive Identities and Conceptual Natures rather than Mass-Energy and Spacetime, where all of this made sense, but it was not the one where I spent the major of my time. Just dipping into it made me feel like I was losing my mind.

Looking around the inside of the room, I frowned. I didn't recall the route I had taken to the firing range being so cluttered with large crates and heavy machinery, or so poorly illuminated.

As I walked around a massive plate press, I saw something.

It was the battlesuit from earlier, resting in a sort of vertical cradle set into a cavity in the ground, umbilicals connected to various ports on the armor. The eyes were glowing only dimly, and as I watched, they faded completely. Several lights on the ceiling came to life, and I looked up, noticing the unusual height of the room, a bit like an aircraft hangar.

With an audible hiss, the frontal chest armor of the battlesuit began to move forward and slide downward. A second layer of armor split vertically, and I realized that the pilot was disembarking. What sort of master of warfare, what kind of grizzled High Priest of Mars would be found worthy of such a steed?

The third inner hatch began to iris open, and I found myself creeping forward until I was standing in front of the hatch.

The cockpit lights activated, revealing a small girl. She was wearing a complex pilot suit with dozens of overlapping and pleated layers with countless wires disappearing into the folds, creating some sort of bizarre Cyberpunk Victorian aesthetic.

She had a light blue hair tucked to the back of her suit, and her arms and legs were completely concealed by the command systems of the cockpit. Her eyes widened as she saw me. I took a step back, and as I did so a mechanical arm reached forward and connected several armatures to points around the girl.

It started to withdraw her from the cockpit, and as she cleared the machine, I realized that her limbs hadn't been concealed by the control systems.

They hadn't been there.

Mechanical prosthetics unfolded as the arm set the battlesuit pilot down, and within seconds, she looked almost normal, the dress-like bottom of her suit covering her legs, and the long sleeves leaving only her mechanical hands visible.

"Who- Who are you?" She said, her voice incredibly soft. "How did you g-get in here?"

"I'm sorry." I said. "I'm Lieutenant Mark Quirinus. I just transferred here, and I have no idea how to get around. But I saw you out on the field. You were very impressive."

I tilted my head at the battlesuit. "You were incredibly graceful, especially considering that you were piloting a machine that big."

She raised a robotic hand to her mouth. "T-Thank you. I..."

"It's true." I said. "I don't believe I know your name."

"I'm Serena." She said. "But why would you want..."

My mobile began chipping the electronic tone of an urgent summon. Serena jumped, but relaxed as she saw me opening an ordinary holographic menu.

"I'm sorry. I'm being called by... Admiral... Hornmeyer?" I shook my head, but that was what the message said. "I have to go."

"Oh." Serena said, looking down and folding her hands. "Um, m-maybe, if-"

"Sure." I said, the fear of being late making my exhaustion suddenly seem much less relevant. "I'll see you later."

[x]

The Admiral looked up from the map on his desk as I entered. Colonel Robichaux was standing on the other side of the desk, pointing at something on the map.

"So. Quirinus." He said. "I hear you are the one responsible for this..."

He gestured at the map. "...Thing."

"Yes, sir." I said. This seemed like a situation which warranted honesty.

"I thought so. Robichaux tried to say it was his. I'm thinking of busting him down to butterbar. Thoughts?"

"I asked him to, sir." I said, as calmly as possible. "I am a largely unknown actor; any plan I proposed would be, at best, ignored. The Colonel thought it was worth further evaluation, so he took it to you."

"As it happens, that is more or less exactly what he said." Hornmeyer said, shrugging. "So at least I know you're good enough conspirators to have your stories planned. Or, God help us all, that this might be for real."

"Sir?" I said. It was true; that word really did have exceptional versatility.

"I say that because this plan is actually passable. It could even work. In which case, we'd be starting a war that would, at best, cost countless thousands of lives to win. Or get us all killed."

"If I may, sir," I said, stepping forward toward the map, "We may all die regardless. The numbers are too favorable to the Vampires in a long war of attrition, and they are still consolidating their position, gaining power in the process. This plan may not be the best one, but turtling up is considerably worse."

Hornmeyer smiled, a predatory, vicious grin. It was... faintly unsettling.

"I thought I'd like you. I like this plan, too, but there are a few problems. Look." He pointed at the map. "For the plan to work, we need to target a large island, but Honshu is too big. That means one of the other three Home Islands; Kyushu, Shikoku, or Hokkaido."

He traced a line from Tokyo bay to Sapporo. "Hokkaido is out, though. While we could probably scrape together enough shipping to invade, any garrison would be at the end of a tenuous supply line. Our merchant fleet, as it were, is too small to absorb the inevitable losses while retaining the capability to complete the mission."

Hornmeyer pointed at the southernmost island. "Kyushu is also a distance away, though the nature of the route makes that much less of a concern. However, there ruined human, and now active vampire, population centers along most of the coastline. We would have to situate the focus of our mobile operations inland, near the center of the island. And despite the guerrilla-derived tactical and strategic elements of this plan, it still requires a conventional fighting force, with all the supply requirements that entails. I think the inland force would be cut off too easily."

"What about Shikoku, sir?" I asked. "I believe I mentioned in my report it was likely the best target."

"And in a vacuum, you'd be right. There is just one problem." Hornmeyer pointed at Kyoto. "Sanguinem."

"From Shikoku, the vampire capital is only about fifty miles away. The vampires may believe we are attempting to secure a jump-off point to attack their capital city and respond accordingly."

"With all due respect, sir, it may be best to think of that as a selling point." I said carefully.

"You can drop the bowing and scraping. Now I'm really interested, and I want you to talk to me like a man. Tell me more."

Standing up straighter, I took a deep breath and began. "Despite its unique nature, the war we are presently fighting is still, at heart, a war between the standing armies of nation-states. Therefore, we cannot expect to achieve a military victory if we are unwilling to engage the enemy in a decisive battle. The vampires have a lot more total throw weight than we do, but Clausewitz taught us that there are ways to counter that. Marshal local superiority, then force a decisive encounter on favorable terms. If we can make the vampires come to us, then that becomes much easier to do."

I could feel myself gaining momentum now. "Furthermore, capturing the island isn't the key factor. What we need to do is face the bloodsuckers, punch them in the eye, and _take_ it from them. We can't just take the territory. We need to defeat them, knock them back on their heels so that they won't _want_ to take Shikoku back until we've had time to fortify the shit out of it."

"Despite the physical differences, mentally, the vampires are really arrogant humans accustomed to operating on generational rather than annual timescales. If the arrogance prevails, they'll probably attack without sufficient preparation, dulling their offensive and or leaving themselves open elsewhere. If patience prevails, we'll turn the island into a giant fortress. Amphibious invasions are considered one of the hardest operations in warfare under the best of circumstances, for reasons that are difficult to negate with simple power."

Hornmeyer raised his hand to his chin and leaned back. "And their political cohesiveness would've made congress look like a damn hive mind..."

"But what about Kochi?" He said, sitting up. "It would present the same problems as the settlements on Kyushu, albeit to a somewhat lesser extent."

I looked at the map intently for a moment, then activated my mobile's holographic display and started looking for the geography encyclopedia I'd seen in the default files. I found it quickly, and a few moments later, I smiled.

"I think I have an idea."

[x]

About an hour later, I was walking back into Admiral Hornmeyer's office. I think he had noticed how pale I was, and had dismissed me to get some lunch while he called his staff.

"God help us all." He said, as soon as I'd closed the door. "But I bought it. I just finished vociferating my way up the Hiiragi Family Phone Tree, and I finally got His Lordship Kureto to agree not bitch about it too loudly. On the plus side, Colonel Ichinose offered the services of himself and the Moon Demon Regiment in our campaign. I took him up on it, because they're exactly the kind of stone-cold crabfuckers we need for the Mobile Strike Units. Legio Alera will be providing the bulk of the personnel, along with the 555th M.I. Regiment and the 9th Cavalry. X-Day is Idibus Martiis."

"That's... A month from tomorrow. Is that wise, sir?"

"We've spent most of the last decade preparing for something like this." Hornmeyer said. "A longer lead-up won't do much good, but may tip the vamps off that we're planning something."

He looked me in the eye. "How confident are you in this plan, son?"

"This is war, sir. The battle plan is always the first casualty. But as far as plans go, I think this is a reasonably good one."

"Good." The Admiral said. "Because I'm putting you in one of the Initial Strike Teams. It'll be a combined squad, and your Demon Army liaison should have arrived by now."

"SIMON CHURCHILL!" Hornmeyer shouted, utterly without warning. "GET YOUR LIMEY NIP ASS IN HERE RIGHT THIS SECOND!"

The door opened again, and a tall, slightly lanky soldier in there uniform of the JIDA and a non-regulation top hat entered. He appeared to be of partial European heritage, and had a large sword slung across his back.

He bowed, tipping his hat to Admiral Hornmeyer. "You called, good sir?"

"Yes. I assumed you received the mission briefing on the tiltjet?"

"That is correct. It is an intriguing stratagem, to be sure."

"Well, you're standing next to the man who came up with it." Hornmeyer said. "He'll be out there with you, so put him through his paces. But try not to get him killed, unless he really fucks up. Got it?"

"I'll do what I can, sir."

"Excellent." Hornmeyer said. "Good hunting."


	3. Rubicon

I stood on the elevated deck of the landing craft as we rocketed towards the shoreline, looking up at the stars. Outside of the USEF Civilian Zones and JIDA fortress-cities, artificial illumination was practically nonexistent, and as a result, the sky was incredibly clear.

Even after a month, looking up at the vault of stars overhead was enough to take my breath away. Men and monster, angels and demons... We could scurry around and fight our grandiose little wars, and stars would keep spinning, just as they always did.

In a way, it was sort of comforting.

The water around the landing craft was inky black in the pre-dawn darkness, and the shoreline ahead was visible as little more than an unusually uniform smudge of darkness along the horizon. I knew there were a total of twelve landing craft on the water, but between the darkness and the shimmer fields suppressing the visual presences of the vessels, I could see nothing.

Riding the assault boat, or more precisely, the hovercraft lander, was odd. The sound of the air cushion, while much quieter than it should have been, was constant and very unique. The craft moved with the calm Pacific waves, but the vessel stayed level with the surface of the water. It felt more like riding an indecisive elevator than a boat.

Seylaifeil stood beside me. She'd exchanged her usual waterfall-of-embers dress for a black leather coat and matching bodysuit, both outlined in deep red, all with the net effect of shifting her look from Victorian England to the Matrix.

"You are worried." Seylaifeil said. It wasn't a question.

I nodded. "I know its Max leading this operation, with Colonel Icherose as his second, and ultimately Admiral Hornmeyer who authorized it, so they bear final responsibility for the outcome here today. But I still came up with so much of the core strategy, I can't help but feel like I'm the one sending these men to their deaths."

"Oh, so it's a bad plan, then?" Seylaifeil said. "I think we still have time before we make landfall. I suppose we better call it off."

"That's not it." I said, frowning. "I think the plan is... a lot better than it could be, and head and shoulders above most of the alternatives. But even so, we're still going to lose people. There's just no way around that."

"So then what are you worried about?" Seylaifeil said. "Is it that you aren't fighting for the sake of a worthy cause?"

"Fundamental freedom and survival for the entire human race seems about as worthy as it's likely to get."

"Oh. You must be bothered by the fact that you're sending men into danger that you are unwilling to face yourself."

"I'm leading one of the Initial Strike Teams." I replied. "Word in the barracks is that the ISTs have the worst job in the whole operation."

Seylaifeil smiled. "You're right. So stop worrying. You've done everything within your power to improve the chances of this operation, and we both know it's a job that must be done. So with your bribes paid, your dice loaded, and your cards marked, the only thing left to do is play the game."

She tilted her head. "And you know what? Out there, the only thing anxiety can do is get in the way."

The door to the wheelhouse behind me opened, and Corporal Hinagiku Sylphrena walked out onto the deck. She wore the ornate green-and-black uniform of the Demon Army, with a spear only slightly shorter than she was in a harness on her back. She had pink hair, long enough to give a USEF sergeant an aneurysm, though she appeared to have somehow compressed it into the legion-style USEF nanogel/fullerene helmet I'd convinced her to wear for the battle.

"We've received the final reports from all detachments." Hinagiku said. "All five heavy landing ships are in position with full tanks and green lights across the board. Sensors and visual inspection report full network integrity. Hill stations and their defending companies are ready in all respects. The flying columns for the main assault are in dispersed cohesion and ready to advance. I believe all elements are ready."

"I concur." I said. "Call Command and-"

"Already approved." Hinagiku said. "You are free to advance at will."

"This is Trajan Actual to all units." I said, broadcast to all twelve of the ISTs. "Cross the Rubicon."

The timbre of the engine changed, and the landing craft began to accelerate towards the shoreline, aiming for the entrance of the inlet which formed the eastern border of the AO, and the area heavily inhabited by the vampires.

Heavily was, in my humble opinion, an understatement. Intel estimated somewhere around eighty thousand Vampires. Not all of those vampires would be soldiers, but they all had their inherent resilience and ungodly strength. And with centuries of unlife behind them, most would have at least some fighting experience.

There would also be the livestock; that number of vampires would indicate a _minimum_ of a quarter of a million captives. Most of them would be children.

I wondered how many of them would survive the day.

The really sick part, of course, was that with a word, I could make that number zero. In a potential siege situation like this, those children represented the sole source of fresh blood for the city's vampires and as such were a perfectly valid military target. Given that long-term stockpiling of blood was impossible, and that the vampires needed it not only as nutrition but to fuel their regeneration and enchanted weaponry, the benefits of the move could be rather substantial.

It wouldn't even be all that hard. The vampire cities all had massive air purification enchantments, necessary to reduce their ventilation requirements from insane to merely outrageous, but they would reduce any atypical atmospheric gas that entered their effect fields.

However, there were certain compounds engineered for war, neurotoxins so mind-numbingly lethal that they could reach lethal concentrations throughout the city in a breathtakingly short span of time, long before the air purification spells could do their work. In Chess parlance, it would be a powerful opening gambit.

But I wasn't doing that. If my plan worked, and if we could keep control of the situation, there was a decent chance most of the captives would survive. That was what the math said, and what I had to believe.

Hinagiku tapped my shoulder. "We're arriving, sir."

"Thank you."

I closed my eyes, reaching for the shining column of blackness that was my bond with Seylaifeil. I touched it, and warmth enveloped my body as gold and obsidian armor took from, shaping itself perfectly over my uniform, which had been custom-made from thin nanofiber material with minimal decoration for that purpose.

The hovercraft began to decelerate, moving sideways as it did so. The whole vessel shook for a moment as it climbed over the rubble of a collapsed seawall, then came to rest in the center of what had once been a waterfront promenade.

Seylaifeil was right. There was no more time for worry. No time to think about who might get killed, or what I'd done wrong, or about the strage, incomprehensible dreams I'd been having.

Assault ramps dropped, and the Battle of Kochi began.

[x]

I ran in formation with Simon Squad, in the center of a hexagon formation.

Valeriya and Natalya Smirnov were the front two points of the formation. They were twins, more or less identical with incredibly pale skin, pure white hair, and glacial blue eyes. Both wore armor even heavier than mine in the color scheme of the Demon Army. Valeriya carried a massive warhammer and ornate shield, while her sister was armed with a set of four twelve-inch curved claw-blades mounted on the back of her gauntlet. Given the resemblance their attire bore to Tactical Dreadnought Armor, I had dubbed them the Terminator Twins.

Simon ran on the right point of the formation. He carried a falchion: a heavy, single-edged sword intended for chopping and hacking rather than anything more delicate. This one had tendrils of blackness occasionally arcing across its surface, though, which probably wasn't normal.

Hinagiku was on left point, carrying her obsidian spear, though nothing appeared unusual about her or her weapon yet.

Kurumi Sugiura and Tadayoshi Kuroda were in the rearguard. They were the only two members of the squad who actually looked classically Japanese. Kurumi carried a naginata, a long and slightly curved blade mounted on a staff analogous to a European Glaive. Specifically, she carried a ko-naginata, a lighter version of the weapon which was the traditional armament of a woman of the Samurai class. Her jet-black hair was bound back with red ribbon into a large ponytail, and her uniform appeared to have been modified to be especially flattering, though without running the risk of leaving extra skin exposed in battle.

Tadayoshi, on the other hand, seemed to be properly military. His hair was a textbook military crew cut, and the only modification he'd made to his uniform was the addition of several patches of ballistic material. He wore heavy gauntlets and bracers on his forearms and hands; they hosted his demon, Ramiel. Technically a Manifestation-class, Kuroda's demon was irregular in that is manifested in and around him, granting him the power to pluck spears out of the air and hurl them with insane power.

Out target, a nondescript concrete building, was several hundred yards from the waterline, but it only took us a couple of minutes to reach it, because having superpowers is awesome. We were able to move through the city safely; the advance parties had eliminated the vampire sentries well before we landed. JIDA illusionists ensured that the command posts underground received their regularly scheduled check-in messages just as late as always, and USEF cyber warfare specialists had cracked the electronic security more than a week ago and continuously recorded all of the sensor feeds, and had now replaced the current feeds with those from three days ago, a morning with weather similar to now.

Moving through the decaying city was unnerving. There were signs of fire everywhere. Even though the Vampires had moved to smother the flames before too many potential captives could be lost, many cities had still burned. Given that a nuclear winter would have been caused by the burning of cities rather than the atomic devices in and of themselves, it had created a similar effect. Combined with the sudden loss of carbon emissions, global warming was now the opposite of a thing.

Apparently, there had also been some truly spectacular sunsets.

We approached the building, then entered by jumping through the open gateway of a truck dock. The inside was one large space, and the first thing I noticed was Serena. She was in her battlesuit, railguns and gatlings trained on the door. Her eyes flashed as she saw us enter, and she stood down.

"Hello, Mark." She said, the unfiltered voice issuing from the suit's speakers amusingly ironic. "Hello, everyone."

I nodded, walking toward the objective. "How go things?"

"Fairly well." Fealty said, rapping her knuckles on the six-foot-diameter pipe rising up to about waist height next to her.

She was wearing light armor, maybe a striped-down version of the Myrmidon-Type Active Suit that was standard issue for USEF light infantry. While all Exile soldiers wore artifact armor, there was a huge range of Types, Patterns, and variants in service.

In short, an Active Suit was light infantry armor, which used artificial muscle strands to counteract its weight and provided a minor boost to strength and vitality when worn. Powered Armor was distinguished by the addition of mechanical augmentations to the armor system. Such suits wore more expensive, both due to manufacturing cost and the increased complexity of the required enhancements, and required a greater ability for Artifact use than Active Suits, but provided much more strength and protection with little sacrifice to dexterity and mobility.

The Armored Combat Suits worn by the Mobile Infantry were a category all to themselves. They synchronized to the user directly rather than responding to movement, and consisted of five separate independently operable synchronized artifacts, while lesser suits only possessed a single enchantment.

However, only one person in twelve could activate an Armored Combat Suit up to combat minimum performance, and that was no guarantee that that they would have the skills necessary to become a Mobile Infantryman, or be the sort of person who could be trusted with the power of an Armored Combat Suit.

In any case, I didn't recognize the pattern of Fealty's suit, which left her head exposed. The number of glowing lines gliding across her skin, which had been present as long as I'd known her, had increased by an order of magnitude, though she didn't seem to be giving any indication that anything was wrong.

"We have everything set up, and the hill stations report ready to go." Fealty said, leaning on the wall behind her. "We were just waiting for a few teams that were having technical difficulties, but they've been mostly resolved."

"So are we ready to breach?" I asked, stepping up next to the pipe and glancing down into the darkness.

"I'd say so." Fealty said, removing a cylindrical device the size of a water bottle from her belt. "Let's fucking do this!"

She handed me the cylinder, then grabbed another one. Hinagiku and Kurumi joined us, procuring devices of their own. We glanced at each other, and Fealty nodded.

I pulled the locking key out of its slot at the top of the device and twisted the cap, the other three doing likewise.

Then we threw the thermite detonation charges into the Sector Seven Main Ventilation Shaft of the Vampire City of Phlebemburg.

As awful as it was, Phlebemburg was hardly the worst of the names I'd seen. The Vampires really needed to learn how to branch out.

It only took a few seconds for the charges to hit the security plate that secured the shaft when it wasn't in use, which was fairly common for this one. The Vampires had been overly optimistic about the number of slaves they'd capture, so most of their cities had about twice as many intake ducts as they really needed.

We watched the thermite burn for about thirty seconds. We only saw an irregular pattern of orange-red, like the coals of a campfire. It was actually hot enough to be glowing bright yellow, but a machine spirit bound in the grenades lingered as they burned, minimizing the thermal emissivity of the thermite and vastly improving their ability to burn on contact.

Apparently, Fealty decided it was taking too long. She removed another grenade from her belt, armed it, and tossed it down the shaft.

As it hit bottom, she was looking back at us like _we_ were the idiots. A few moments passed, then the security hatch gave out with a groan of tortured metal.

"Start setting up." I said, turning away from the duct and walking back toward Serena.

"I called the Colonel." She said, the volume on her speakers much lower than they'd been a few minutes ago. "He said that we're ready to go, but wants you to call it off if there's something he's missing."

I nodded. "Give me a general broadcast to the assault force."

Serena's suit nodded. "Okay. You're on."

"Humanity confides that every man will do his duty." I said, trying to project strength and calm with my voice.

I'd never done anything like this, but all the military history I'd read indicated that a commander's mood could be infectious. Even if I wasn't truly in command, I needed to display the attitude the assault force needed for the plan to work.

But for what it was worth, I think we had a plan Admiral Nelson would approve. It was a departure from strategic orthodoxy, as so much as this war could he said to have any, and it took risks where the reward was disproportionately large while remaining cautious where there was little to be gain.

Or so I hoped, anyway.

"Open the floodgates." As I spoke, Fealty grabbed a lever protruding from a box secured to the floor and pushed it forward.

Mere moments later, the eight large hoses ending in nozzles bolted to the rim of the air shaft began to pump seawater into the vampire city.

Collectively, they moved slightly more than sixty-four hundred gallons of water a minute. It worked out to about one cubic _meter_ every two and a half seconds; enough to fill a large tanker truck in the time it took to play a TV-sized anime opening.

The water from the hoses was provided by a portion of the flow from a pair of much larger feeder lines, each of which moved enough water for two dozen of the hoses. Each feeder line led back to one of the hill stations above the city, which in turn connected, very indirectly, to the sea. But powerful as the heel pumps were, they could never have moved the volumes of water the plan called for on their own.

The horsepower for _that_ task was provided by the five heavy landing ships, carefully 'beached' on steel frames some distance out of the ocean. Their powerful pump-jet engines could move upward of 2.5 million gallons per minute; some quick and vicious retrofitting made them perfect for the task. It had been a challenge connecting them to the hill stations, but the vampire patrols outside the surface city of Kochi proper were halfhearted at best, and the Corps of Engineers had finished laying the camouflaged pipes almost a week ago.

Acquiring the various hoses needed had been more difficult. Even after commandeering most of the relevant machinery is USEF territory, the last of the hoses had been finished only forty-eight hours ago. Helping to fight the thousand brushfires the plan had caused, along with keeping on my needed training, had made the past month a nightmare.

But as I savored the smell of the salt in the air, the echoing roar of the water cascading down the ventilation shaft, it suddenly felt like it had all been worthwhile.

The reckoning had begun.

[x]

A mile away, Virgil looked at the front gate to the Vampire City as the attack began in earnest, enclosed entirely in his armor. He could barely feel its presence, which only made it more uncomfortable.

The Engineers had gone to work on the city gate. It was more than two hundred meters across, stupidly tall, and was big enough to need to be buried in its own cavern well below the city. Shaped charge demolition devices had been placed all over the door. There were hundreds of small, coffee-can sized charges, as well as several dozen larger bombs the size and rough shape of stage lights. Wires ran between them in an insane spiderweb, linking the explosives back to the command consoles.

Virgil sighed. He'd lied on that day, when he meet Mark at the shooting range. He had lost his Stalker, but another one could have been procured. He hadn't been turned down for logistics reasons.

He'd simply been too good a Mobile Infantryman to spend any more time horsing around with the cavalry.

He hated it. Wearing the heavy suit, but feeling like it was part of his body, the jetpack maneuvers, the continuous influx of information... He shook his head. He'd requested a transfer to both the regular light and heavy infantry, but they'd been turned down. He tried to tell himself that he was lucky he had the chance to live somewhere as stable and safe as the USEF Controlled Zones, and he should be proud he had the chance to fight to protect that to the best of his ability, but that didn't make it any less uncomfortable.

A countdown appeared on his HUD. Ten seconds. It seemed to pass in the blink of an eye.

Then the charges detonated, and the gate collapsed into a cloud of dust.

Virgil charged forward at the head of a wave of Armored Combat Suits. The infantry needed time to fortify this position, and they couldn't do that with Vampires trying to force their position and take mile-long staircase.

So the Mobile Infantry would buy them that time.

[x]

Aria Valentine looked up from her holofields, which were displaying live footage of the ongoing battle from dozens of stealthed command observation drones positioned around the Area of Operations. The time was 0743, little more than two hours since twelve thousand soldiers of mankind had commenced their assault on Kochi, heralding the beginning of the first division-scale human offensive operation since the end of the world.

The flow of the battle had been unusual, just as much so as the human plan of attack. There had been a dozen major skirmishes across the surface city as the vampires mounted confused and largely reflexive counterattacks. Human units, scattered across the AO in pre-prepared strongpoints, engaged the emerging vampires. It had been hairy for about twenty minutes, with two stations pumping water into the city taken, but as the human main forces stationed outside the city arrived, the first vampire counters were thrown back or destroyed.

However, the largest action thus far had taken place in Phlebemburg itself. The first battalion of the 555th Mobile Infantry Regiment had descended the main stairs into the heart of the city and mounted a forward defense there as the engineers hastily constructed fortification at the ruined upper gate.

For a furious half hour, one thousand Mobile Infantrymen did battle with dozens of Nobles, twelve hundred vampire regulars, and several times as many vampire 'noncombatants', who were nonetheless nearly as dangerous as the soldiery, if slightly less organized.

The ACS had suffered over two hundred casualties, though most of those soldiers were unharmed and had simply suffered debilitating suit damage, which could generally be repaired in short order. But they had given as good as they'd got, and the lodgment they'd held had allowed dozens of squadrons of USEF combat drones to infiltrate the city. Afterwards, the ACS had retreated in good order, the flow of water down the massive staircase from the large-aperture pipes built into the fortifications at the top combined with more conventional supporting fire effectively preventing the vampires from pursuing.

Valentine opened up the feed compilation from one of the drone squads. The Autonomous Mechanical Airborne Combat Platform was still something of an experimental system, and this was the first time it was being deployed in combat and intended to be a productive rather than to test the system under live-fire conditions. They were operating within acceptable parameters, though she'd needed to manually adjust their shoot-no shoot protocols, and override them manually a few times. She would also probably need to send a memo about using the drones in areas with a significant civilian population.

Just as she was about to open the feed from another drone squad, an alert appeared on her display. Valentine frowned as she flicked it open. A moment later, her eyes widened. The captive vampire's core temperature had spiked to well over one hundred degrees, and her neurological activity had skyrocketed.

"Maximize atmospheric cooling in containment unit." Valentine commanded, activating her voice command interface as she stood up. "Triple air circulation, and extract standard samples for analysis."

She paused for a moment. "Raise internal threat status by twenty-five percent of the calculated value."

A deep breath. "Arm failsafes."

[x]

In the middle of the battlefield, as a hundred thousand men and monsters met in furious life-and-death combat, it seemed as though the impossible had happened.

Surrounded by the flames of a war I had played a... not small... part in igniting, I was bored.

Now that the battle was in progress, the numerous small conflicts were almost entirely directed by the Junior Officers and NCOs of the engaged units, and the few real decisions about the deployment of reserve troops were in the hands of the actual mission commanders. I wasn't involved in any strategic decisions, and I was completely isolated from tactical affairs by virtue of the fact that a grand total of zero vampires had even approached my pump station. I knew, from a purely logical point of view, I should be glad that I had yet to face a serious threat to my life, but...

I shook my head and leaned back against the wall. I needed to not think so much.

Serena stood just outside the building, the hulking form of her battlesuit motionless. Though the rest of us were all rotating through sentry duty, her sensors made that an empty gesture. I could think of a few fringe cases where she might miss something we would spot, but they were all ridiculous; the most plausible involved seventeen thousand goats and an industrial mixer.

We had been pumping water for a little more than four hours now, holding the line at the entrances to the underground city and beating back breakouts where possible. The pre-positioned reaction companies had reached their stations quickly, and as soon as the defense lines were finished, the Engineers had begun demolition work to allow them maximum mobility, which they had used to great effect.

"Mark." For the first time in an hour, my earpiece crackled to life.

"What is it, sir?"

"The ACS unit at the main entrance has engaged another vampire breakout attempt." Colonel Robichaux said briskly. "This one was battalion-strength, and they reached the top of the stairs before we forced them back. The drone feed is showing an even bigger force marshalling at the bottom of the stairs. If we don't reinforce more aggressively or let the machine gunners cut loose, I don't know if we can hold."

"You know the plan." I said. "We can't risk scaring them off. How many are we looking at in this wave?"

Max sighed. "At least fifteen thousand, half of them regulars. I think they want to punch through and start clearing us off the surface in one move."

"That's... More than I anticipated, but I think we can handle it. We set this up to be able to deal with twenty."

"We both know that was optimistic. This whole plan was."

I shrugged. "How can man die better than facing fearful odds? This isn't a world where playing it safe is a viable option."

Max muttered something that I couldn't make out. "I'm moving 4th Battalion into position behind the ACS. They should be in position to counterattack without being overly visible."

"That sounds good." I said, berating myself for not thinking of such an obvious solution. "Anything else?"

"Not now." Max said. "Don't die out there. That's an order."

[x]

Virgil leveled his M132 heavy rail rifle at the cloud of inky darkness and fired a long burst at the faint silhouettes of the vampires within. The silvery filaments pierced the insubstantial haze with ease, though they faded from sight quickly as they descended into darkness. Virgil picked up a spray of something on his sensors, though he had no way of knowing if it was a lethal, or even disabling, hit.

He really hoped it was a kill shot. Beyond general principles, there were a _lot_ of Vampires currently trying to force the grand stair, and unlike in their first few attempts, they were actually behaving somewhat intelligently.

The enemy had built a series of barricades up the stair, most of which were actually _more_ ramshackle than the one the USEF forces had constructed across the top of the stair. They had interlocking enchanted shields mixed in with curse-fused furniture and the ever-abundant concrete and steel rubble. The placement left something to be desired, but it was allowing the vampires to mass their force much more efficiently.

The rush of the water pouring from the pipes in the human barricade provided an odd background to the nonstop chatter of gunfire. The water rushed down the stair in a thin, turbulent sheet, breaking around the vampire barricades like river rocks. Combat under such conditions would be nearly impossible for normal human soldiers, but if it bothered the bloodsuckers, they we're showing it.

Abruptly, bullets began striking the human barricade most bouncing off with fountains of black sparks. Unlike the thaumaturgically-enhanced USEF technological weapons, the vampires used old-style chemical firearms essentially as delivery methods for destructive magic. Using a random patchwork of wards on the barricades, while reducing their absolute defensive strength, provided an effective countermeasure.

However, there was a fairly strong argument to be made that better cover made suppressive fire more effective.

Virgil switched his primary visual feed to his gunsight and held is rifle up over the wall. He could fire, but controlling the recoil was difficult, and under the best conditions, it would have been blowing into a hurricane. The vampire conscripts surged forward, firing wildly. For a moment, it seemed as if the human line would be overrun.

Then the Heavy Weapons Suit units went to work. Equipped with a pair of MV-44 'Reaper' automatic grenade launchers, they could cut down swaths of the enemy with metal and fire.

For the thirty or so seconds their ammo would last, anyway.

The vampire assault wave faltered, then started to fall back as the ACS infantry started to return fire. The enemy dropped back to their barricades, leaving a depressingly small number of empty robes and dropped weapons behind. The ACS had also taken relatively few casualties, but the vampires could afford the losses.

They had also managed to drag their cloud of darkness further up the stairs, though there far more than enough targets easily visible to maintain engagement.

"Drone infiltration units are reporting the main enemy mass moving onto the stair." Someone announced over the Joint Tactical Network. "Looks like this is the big one. Remember the special orders. Godspeed, gentlemen."

Paradoxically, the incoming fusillade actually seemed to slacken as the speaker finished. The vampires were probably moving forces into position to attack. The front ranks were likely comprised largely of the vampire militia; Virgil suspected they lacked the skill to be trusted to safely lay down a suppressing barrage while moving under fire.

Virgil sprang up fired three bursts in quick succession, then dropped before he could catch any accurate return fire. For a human force, an uncovered advance would be tantamount to suicide, but the vampires had the durability and regeneration to force the maneuver. The enemy continued massing for several minutes.

And then for a moment, the foe's guns fell silent.

For a moment, it felt almost as if some twisted simulacrum of peace had returned to the space that had become Virgil's world.

The vampires attacked.

A hurricane of hexcaster fire stuck the human line. Had Virgil not lived through the end of the world, may well have thought that the end had come. Several crackling bolts of crimson energy laced with absolute blackness shot up out of the darkness, fired by noble vampires somewhere below. They struck the barricade like battleship shells, vanishing in showers of scarlet and cobalt sparks as the defensive enchantments strained to negate the baleful energies.

The wards held. For the moment.

Then the enemy charged, a rolling tide of black and grey and red.

Virgil began to pour fire down onto them, but it seemed to do nothing, the rain of human fire utterly insignificant against the massed force of elemental evil.

[x]

"Blow the chokers and start the injectors." I said, watched the composite feeds on the tablet Fealty had helpfully provided, Seylafiel's ring oddly warm on my finger. "Sweep the leg."

[x]

Virgil frowned as the rate of water pouring down the stair tripled. In a bizarre, fragmentary moment of detached contemplation, he thought he saw an odd glimmer on a less turbulent patch of water.

Then his eyes widened. Virgil only had a moment to contemplate the fact that the vampires were slipping as though they'd charged into a minefield of Acme banana peels before the dozen or so concrete-wrapped and foam-filled mortars he'd had no idea were built into the wall around him fired.

[x]

Serena felt herself simile as she watched the carnage unfold through the virtual command manifold surrounding her and adjusted the angle of the second line of mortars, stationed just behind the staircase MLR.

It wasn't the death that she found so pleasant. Unlike many, she didn't hate the vampires; what they were was a fact, and the other facts of the situation made conflict inevitable.

She had few memories of her father. He'd been a Marine, one of the first to join an experimental power armor unit and one of the greatest martyred heroes in the furious battles to purge Chiba and secure the Northern Defense Line.

The mortars fired, low charges to send them arcing down to the bottom portions of the stair.

Serena had found a stray dog, a smaller, friendly animal, in the wake of the Apocalypse, and kept it as a pet thereafter. One of her only clear memories of her father was the moments leading up to, and the conversation after he shot it.

He explained that the dog had caught rabies, and that killing it was the only way to protect his beautiful little girl who mattered more to him than a million dogs ever could. He didn't hate it for that; it never had a choice.

So he did what needed to be done, regretting the necessity and nothing more.

Serena watched a bit more, then opened a channel to her Warlord-Lieutenant.

"Is it time for stage two?" She asked.

[x]

I nodded. "Let fire be their reward."

[x]

Behind the USEF defense line on the main stair, an array of tubes connected the pipes in the wall producing the torrent down the stairs with the heavy feed lines from the distant hill stations.

There were a series of large holes in the interior surface of a certain section of each tube, corresponding to rigid, bulky brace on exterior of the tube, with three thick blue hoses connected to pump intakes on each such brace.

The pumps maintained pressure in the reservoir shroud in the brace, connected to the main line of flow by several short connections slanted to point in the direction of flow. As per Bernoulli's Principle, the speed of the water moving through the pipe reduced its pressure, creating a siphon action that drew the highly concentrated aqueous industrial lubricant waiting into the shroud into the stream at a rate of thousands of liters per minute.

A vampire possessed enormous physical power, allowing it to, at speed, perform feats of athleticism and order of magnitude beyond what any human could ever accomplish. However, by nature, doing so was like driving a sports car on winding, poorly lit mountain road at autobahn speeds. The elevated agility and reaction speed of vampire made it possible.

So, a pair of devious individuals had set about to layer the entire road with ice, smooth it to Olympic regulations, spilled oil on it, and then reversed about half the turn warning signs.

A human might miss a step and fall. A vampire moving fifteen times faster will miss a step and _fly_.

Not, of course, that such a fail poses a serious threat to anything but their pride. It was the figures in the grey, green, and black of the United States Exile Forces Corps of Engineers that held that honor. A small team took up position at each of the plenum braces and, as the signal was given, one member of each team stopped and locked the pumps as the other two disconnected the blue hoses.

As the first man initiated a purge cycle of the reservoir shroud, his teammates moved the red hoses, between five and seven per brace, and connected them to the intakes. A moment was taken to confirm the integrity of the seals, and the pumps were restarted.

Within seconds of the last pump starting, aviation fuel was drawn into the stream of water and ejected at nearly three times the rate of the lubrication agent before it.

Seconds passed. Then a figure in slate-grey armor, indistinguishable from the soldiers around him save for the stylized eagles stenciled in dull red onto each shoulder, stepped up to near the top of the barricade, raised a pistol, and fired.

For an instant, the overwhelming cacophony of gunfire and sorcery seemed to fade as the flare ignited, burning white-hot as it rose out over the stair, reached its zenith, and began to fall.

[x]

Virgil watched as the world turned to fire. The vampires had gone sprawling when they lost friction, a massive dogpile developing as the assault stalled. Many had fallen, and many of them had yet to recover when the Colonel fired his flare.

A warning flashed across Virgil's HUD: 'FIRE HAZARD; MINOR FUEL LEAK REF CL-11'.

CL-11 was an amazing substance. It was an aviation fuel, but with an energy density such that it would have turned electric cars back into toys if it had been marketed before the Apocalypse, a gigajoule per gallon or something about as insane.

And though he didn't know, the CL-11 in question would never have been unusable as fuel. The spellcraft specialists of the Moon Demon Regiment had been hard at work over the truck-sized tanks of fuel in the week before the operation, adding their own signature touch. Bond decay augmentations, stimulation enhancement, oxidation assists and, of course, the hexes to nullify vampiric resistances.

Now, Virgil looked out, unflinching, over the hellscape before him, laying down suppressive fire more out of habit than anything else. The furious war cries of the vampire soldiery had risen into shrieks of agony as the raging flames and the guns of humanity allowed them no escape.

Within a minute, the horde of monsters had been reduced to a pathetic, tortured wreck. Virgil's vision blurred as tears rose unbidden in his eyes.

The world was truly beautiful.

[x]

Colonel Maxime Tindall Robichaux smiled as he opened a general command broadcast channel.

"This is it, gentlemen." He said, watching as the flow of water down the stairs diminished, then vanished. "Into the breach."

The first step of the charge came when the ACS troops fell back from the line they'd fought so hard to protect, allowing the engineers to blow it up as they condensed into four columns equally spaced along the front.

A pause.

Then, with a sound like Zeus himself laying down suppressive fire, the assembled lancers of the United States Ninth Cavalry Battalion charged through the provided gaps, spreading out to descend the stairs at full tilt. It took nearly two full thunderous minutes for the full thousand cavalrymen to pass. Almost as soon as the last rider had begun his descent, the 555th Mobile Infantry and the Imperial Japanese Moon Demon Regiment followed them into the earth.

[x]

Count Finavarius Velkar, Tenth Progenitor and Lord of Phlebemburg, smashed his hand into the map table, sending a web of cracks radiating across the polished black marble surface and knocking several of the unit models onto their sides.

"Repeat that." He said slowly, the best pace he could manage while retaining a semblance of composure. "Everything. In detail."

"Yes, milord." The messenger said. The commoner was clearly terrified, but his profession required considerable grace under pressure. "As ordered, Lord Chen led his soldiers in a full assault up the grand stair in order to break through the kine's defensive position and eliminate their forces on the surface. The attack was going well until they made it perhaps seven-tenths to the livestock. The exact events are unclear, but the attack was stalled, and they were killed to a man, at which point the kine launched a counterattack and-"

Finavarius dealt a short backhand to the messenger's cheek, cutting off his prattle as he was nearly decapitated and sent sprawling into a corner to crumble away. He turned back to the map table, and his somewhat more apprehensive lieutenants.

"We are still unable to contact the Duke?"

"Correct, sir. The loss of all external contact was the first sign of anything out of the ordinary, and has reminded total and constant to the present."

"And the blood supply?"

"Restive, milord. We have moved them back from the human penetrations into the city, but they know something is amiss beyond a simple attack. May saw fire spilling into the entry plaza, and hiding the continuous flow of casualties back to the cleansing and regeneration facilities is effectively impossible."

The supply minister paused. "They know we are fighting a major battle, and I believe that many have arrived at the, naturally incorrect, conclusion that we are... losing... sir."

The count glare at the newly-promoted representative of the city's soldiery. "And in reality?"

"They have penetrated several blocks outward from the entrance plaza onto the main level. The layout of that area provides no avenue for assault from above or below, and the fighting has settled into a stalemate along the main front."

"Stalemate? How have they massed a sufficiently large rabble so quickly?"

"They... I estimate about six thousand ferals total in the lodgement. There are more of the metal kine than we believed existed currently engaged, as well as a large mass of cavalry and the demon soldiers."

Count Finavarius growled. "What sort of trickery is this? Livestock cannot gain that level of power. They know they cannot fight their betters, so they must be using some artifice in an attempt to cause us to hesitate. We cannot let lower animals deceive us. Attack at once."

The military representative cleared his throat. Finavarius glanced at him.

"Milord, the line enemy line comes within three blocks of a primary avenue. If they counterattack and reach it avenue, they could use it to shift forces across nearly half of the western quadrant and potentially encircle most of our attacking force."

"What makes you think them so capable?" Finavarius said, lowering his hand to level with his sword belt.

"I normally believe nothing of the sort." The soldier responded, a hair too quickly. "But we lost many of our best fighters on the stair, and the kine have clearly gathered a large portion of their full might here."

"All the more reason to crush them now. Their improbable feat on the stair will have pushed them to the breaking point. We will shatter the entirely of their line in a single stroke."

[x]

"I think it's go time." Hinagiku said, flicking through reports on the holographic display of a battlefield Mobile she'd 'found'. "That is, if you're still insistent on going through with this... plan. It looks like the assault force has this well in hand. I'll admit I was skeptical, but the Mobile Infantry/Extermination Unit composite squads seem to be performing admirably."

I shook my head. "Eighty thousand vampires in the city, and we probably haven't killed more than twenty-five. We've eliminated the best soldiers, and now that we've secured a position inside the city, the rest are probably manageable. But we'd take casualties, and reducing the rest of the enemy will take time, which I'm not at all sure we have."

Seylaifeil appeared next to her. "For what it's worth, preparations are complete. Magically, you're about as close to full as you're going to get, and I've been cutting back on replenishment to prepare for a period of elevated output. Plus, your soul is in great condition, so there's plenty I can rip off to fuel even more."

I gave no response. It might have drawn some odd looks from my less hallucinatory comrades, but that's life.

"Anyway, I've got to agree with the pink one." Seylaifeil said. "This is a really stupid plan."

"Are the illusions going to work properly?" I asked, ignoring the whatever-Seylaifeil-was and replying in the apparently undetectable manner normal for our conversations.

"Perfectly. Fire and shadow, remember?" Seylaifeil shook her head. "Of all the dozens of types and hundreds of subtypes of magic, I'm probably fourth best at illusion."

"What are the top three?"

"Evocation and Transmutation, probably."

I pressed my lips into a line, trying to keep my reaction to that minimum. "That's two things."

Seylaifeil shrugged. "Anyway, if you want to do this, then let's get going. I'll probably want to change my relationship status in advance, get a head start on finding a new meal ticket."

Hinagiku closed her display, her spear appearing in her hand in a flash of flame. "Not like I don't have all day."

"Yeah, let's do this." I said, stepping toward the ventilation shaft, which had been cleared of pumping equipment. "Primary route going to work?"

"It should." Hinagiku said, wrapping a cable around her spear and driving it into the ground. "Nothing in the ventilation should have been able to hold water; the pressure and the incendiaries should've cleared the path."

"And everyone has the warning? I'd rather not eat a Blowdart on my way in."

Hinagiku shrugged, tossing the free end of the cable down the ventilation shaft. "I'm an idiot, not incompetent. I made sure everyone got the memo."

"Excellent." I said, stopping next to the edge of the pipe. Hinagiku handed me the cable as Natalya rather casually ripped half the pipe off and tossed it aside.

I stepped up the edge of the shaft, concentrating on making sure the jump units on my armor formed properly and _most certainly not thinking about the abyss in front of me_.

"He who hesitates is lost, I suppose." I muttered, turning around and taking a step back.

[x]

Izumi Kirishima was terrified. She was fairly well hidden in the detritus cluttering the top of the rooftop, but she wasn't sure if that mattered. Still, she had to remain in place; if one of the vampires, or these new attackers, came for them, she might be able to give the children below enough warning to have a fighting chance of escape.

She looked up. There was a spot in the ceiling glowing a dull cherry red. It was somewhere to the south and west, almost certainly over the city center, and it seemed to be growing, the center warming to a-

It exploded with a clap of thunder, sending incandescent debris showing onto the city below. Izumi watched with a growing sense of awe as a figure, clearly discernable as humanoid even at a distance, descended into the city cavern.

He was clad in radiant golden plate and surrounded by an aura of flickering fire. As Izumi started, wings like impossibly large cut gemstones of pure light spread from his back and his cloak of flames seemed to intensity, layers appearing one over another.

Izumi didn't remember doing anything, but she must have called the younger children, because they were all claiming positions to watch as the golden figure began to slowly descend.

Once he began to move, it only took Izumi a moment to determine his destination. He was heading directly for the citadel at the city center, the residence and stronghold of the vampire ruler.

[x]

Aria Valentine looked at the captive vampire. She'd removed most of the creature's original garments, attached well over a hundred various electrodes, Hall Effect sensors, subsurface thermal scanners, and almost anything else she could have sent to her that might give her a clue as to what was going on. As the vampire's core temperature reached the range that would have constituted a life-threatening fever for a human, Valentine stated to note some irregularities on its neural activity readout consistent with mild heat exhaustion in a human. As the temperature continued to increase, she gave up on the delicate approach and stuck the Vampire in an ice bath.

That seemed to work, stopping the core temperature increase at 104.8 and returning neural activity to the previous state of irregularity. She'd set up a supply of blood on an IV drip, and was considering salting the ice bath to see if she could get the temperature down. She had a few pharmaceuticals she wanted to test, but was fairly certain that any of them would be denatured by the vampire's elevated internal temperature before anything interesting would happen.

Something started beeping. Valentine looked back at her detailed readouts and spotted a... _toxicity warning_? Given the general dearth of poisons known to be effective on the undead, it would be the system making an informed guess that it had detected a compound having a probable negative effect on the subject. As she pulled up more details, she became increasingly inclined to agree.

Then she reach the analysis of the suspected toxin and stopped. It was strange, for a number of reasons.

First, it was certainly a new arrival; there had been no trace of it in any of the blood samples or biopsies Valentine had collected. However, it was certainly not something she'd administered or a probable impurity in any of those compounds, and as she considered it, became increasingly unsure if manufacturing the toxin would even be possible without atomic-level assembly.

And if someone had managed to pull that off, she'd have heard about it.

Valentine stopped for a moment, thinking. If the toxin was largely localized in the blood, or accumulated there, it was possible that she could use hemodialysis to remove it. The problem, of course, being that almost no one in New Constantinople actually needed recurring dialysis; caused by a combination of the end of the world and revolutionary medical biocybernetics.

The next option would be an exchange transfusion; flushing and refilling the entire circulatory system. It could be used to counteract extreme imbalances in body chemistry and reduce the damage caused by certain drugs or toxins, if no better method was available. Unfortunately, Valentine had no idea if that would have a similar effect on the subject.

There was also the fact that she had no idea how to perform such a procedure, but that was less of an issue. She was fairly confident that killing this particular patient would require at least some effort.

Aria spent a few minutes reading through the available literature on the subject, becoming increasingly sure that calling for an actual doctor would be a poor decision. Off the top of her head, she couldn't think of anyone trustworthy with the requisite skills, and she wasn't even sure how much good human medical training would do. The occult defenses of a noble vampire would render most medical implants largely useless; Valentine would improvising.

She stood up and walked over to one of the supply cabinets the project had appropriated and withdrew a monomolecular fullerene/qsteel scalpel.

"Take chances and make mistakes, was it?" Valentine said, watching the light play across the scalpel as she inspected the edge.

[x]

The golden figure had come to a stop over the center of the city, hovering above and before the citadel. Izumi was no stranger to ignorance of the details and nature of grand events, but this was a step beyond that.

After a moment's pause, the figure spoke.

"I have come to parley. I would speak with the lord of this city and realm."

His voice was rich and precise, with a deep, resonant quality, as though he was using one of he sound amplification systems of the Old World. It was... Impressive, to say the very least.

It took a moment for anything to happen. Izumi assumed they were delaying as some form of posturing; it seemed to be the characteristic thing from them to do.

Then a door leading onto the roof of the citadel opened, and a vampire in the decorated white cloak of the aristocracy exited. Two more followed, then a taller vampire in a much more elaborate white mantle of the nobility stepped out onto the roof and looked up at the golden figure.

"What is this?" The noble asked, with less condescension in his voice than Izumi would have expected.

"I have come to negotiate the terms of your surrender."

"Absurd!" The vampire exclaimed, slashing a hand through the air. "What are you suggesting?"

"That you and you men have acquitted yourselves well, but that your position has become untenable with no useable routes of withdrawal." The figure paused. "Honorable surrender if the only chance you or any of your command have of leaving this city... Intact."

"Are you suggesting that I am on the verge of being bested by... _livestock_? You've brought your rabble into _my_ city. Your defeat is inevitable!"

"So, I suppose you're saying that your inherent superiority will carry the day?" The figure shook his head. "That's a novel hypothesis. But then, it would explain how thirteen thousand warriors held off my host of nearly a hundred thousand."

Izumi practically feel the grin.

"Wait. I think I may have gotten that backwards."

"You have ten times that number. _Cattle_ cannot triumph against their betters-"

"You do know that ranching accidents were an occasional occurrence, right?" The figure responded. "At least, they were before you vampires killed everyone."

The vampire's tone shifted. "It was you miserable humans who brought the apocalypse upon yourselves-"

"Yes, by meddling with the curse of the Seraph of the End. I've heard the party line." A shrug. "But I find it hard to believe. In the absence of any evidence... Well, Qui Bono?"

The vampire said nothing.

"In any case, you really should try and be less inflammatory. I'm trying to be a magnanimous victor, but your rather questionable rhetoric and _creative_ logic is making me want to reconsider. If you'd like to skip to the _ad hominem_ attacks, I'd be fine with that if it gets this discussion back on track."

Izumi couldn't quite make out the vampire lord's response, though it didn't sound particularly eloquent or well-enunciated.

"Well. How about this." The figure shifted slightly in the air. "You and your men lay down arms, and the United States Exile Forces accept your surrender. We collect your weapons and take custody of your captives, and you go back to your settlement near Tokushima, by a method to be agreed upon following provisional acceptance. You and your people all swear that you don't take up arms against organized human forces for one thousand days, and no one else has to die today."

"So, you have the gall to come here and demand that my people turn over our weapons, to you _livestock_?" The vampire sounded like he was practically spitting. "I will tear out your entrails and water the ground with your blood. I will-"

[x]

I winced internally as Count Finavarius started ranting. It probably hadn't been wise to hit so many berserk buttons in quick succession, but in my defense, he had a _lot_ of those, and I was having **far** more fun than was situationally appropriate.

The aura of fire around me was the product of three simple and intentionally sloppy illusion spells. There was a second one on my armor, and two more to make up the wings of light. It was absurd and over the top, which was exactly what I was going for. Even combined, the six spells weren't particularly energy-intensive, though I probably could have used a quarter of what they were using if I'd created one enchantment and constructed it properly.

"-Water the ground with your blood. I will rend your carcass for the vultures and-"

I raised my hand to point at the Vampire Count.

"Fiat Lux." I said, releasing the massive enchantment I'd been holding in place and constructing.

For a moment, the air around me seemed to _thrum_ with power as the various component parts of the spell fell into place.

Then a ray of liquid fire as brilliantly white as the unfiltered sun lanced out from my hand, tracing a razor-straight path down to the center of the citadel below.

The beam burned a torso-sized hole in Finavarius' chest as it passed to strike the stone behind him. It flashed the stone to vapor, the material expertly warded against wide-area attacks akin to the slashing magics popular with the vampire nobility lasting bare instants against the insanely focused attack.

The superheated cloud of vaporized material blasted into the chamber below, scattering the leading edge of the beam, turning the air to fire. The gas cooled as it explosively expanded, through slowed by the backblast from the beam cutting through the floor, with the net effect of the entire upper level abruptly becoming a sort of facsimile of the inside of the cartridge of a firing rifle. Eventually, the cool outside air would rush back in through the shattered windows and cracked exterior walls and allow anything even remotely flammable inside the building to burn, but not until well after the process had repeated itself on each level down to the ground.

I looked down at the smoke beginning to spill out of the gutted citadel. It was a good start, but there was still a whole city of bloodsucking parasites left below me. It was time for a cleansing fire.

Marshaling my power, I held out my hand, and a pinpoint of light appeared. It grew brighter, quickly reaching what might have been hazardous intensity, for a lesser man. I would-

"Quirinus! What the hell are you doing?"

"What do you want, Robichaux?" I growled, looking back towards the USEF line.

"You are listing in excess of ten degrees, Lieutenant." Max shot back. "And I _don't_ like what your shadow is doing. _Stand down_."

I stood outside myself for a moment, then returned to a skewed world.

The power coursing through my blood vanished, leaving behind an overwhelming and empty cold. My armor became an encumbrance, as if I was wearing simple steel.

And I realized exactly what I'd been thinking. What I'd been _considering_.

"Roger that." I said, my voice a hoarse whisper. "Mission accomplished. Returning to base."

[x]

For the umpteenth time in the past hour, Serena ran through the checklist for the upcoming operation. It was largely an addendum to the amphibious assault, but securing a gain was just as important as taking it, and the briefing had implied that this was about more than simply shooting down the vampire transports before they reached the outer defense lines.

Exterior power feeds... Auxiliary cooling systems... Long-range fire control... All systems were go.

"Contacts have reached the outer marker." The radar tech said, speaking over the tactical voice channel. "Standby to fire."

[x]

I groaned, waking up slowly. It was, of course, the dreams. Again.

Seylaifeil appeared, sitting at the foot of the bed. She was wearing what appeared to be a nightgown variant of her usual flame-and-char attire. It might have been rather appealing; I didn't allow myself to check.

"So, this makes what?" She said. "Twelve of the past twenty nights?"

"Thirteen of twenty-one now." I shook my head. "And you are being entirely truthful and forthright when you say you have nothing to do with this, or no knowledge thereof?"

"Yes. Absolutely."

The response came just a hair too slow.

I sighed. "I'm not going to get back to sleep right now. I'm going for a walk."

Seylaifeil said nothing as I slid out of bed and grabbed my uniform jacket from the peg on the wall. The 7th Marine Expeditionary Brigade _Legio Alera_ had appropriated a mostly-sound office building and converted it into a temporary headquarters, and a large number of the offices had become generally livable quarters for the officers and command staff. Organized resistance in the city below had ceased, but the area had yet to be declared safe.

I walked out of my quarters, down the stairs, and out the checkpoint on the ground floor into the cold march air. I was barely slowed; I simply returned the salutes of the four ACS troopers and eight armored Marines on obvious guard and continued out.

The nightmares were like insane fever dreams; confusing, overwhelming and relentless sensory barrages. I felt like there was _something_ coherent happening just beyond my understanding; but there was too much happening too quickly to actually comprehend any of it.

Generally, the nightmares seemed to follow a fairly regular pattern. I'd wake up at some point, usually a few hours after falling asleep, having spent an indeterminate period of subjective time under assault by one of the dreams. Then, at some point, I'd usually fall asleep again and have no further difficulties.

It was rather vexing, for a number of reasons.

Eventually, I found my way to another building, somewhere closer to the waterfront. Judging by the colored bands spraypainted next to the door, the engineers had designated the building as structurally sound and scheduled it for demolition later tomorrow, or rather, later this afternoon. I walked through the empty front wall and came to a staircase. I wasn't really sure where I was going, or what I was looking for. I reached the top of the stairs and found myself stepping out onto the roof and approaching the rail, looking out over the corpse of the city man had once called Kochi.

Though the area was yet to be fully secured, work had already begun.

For the first time in nearly a decade, everywhere I looked, lights burned defiance into the night. Out on the water, running lights gleamed in three neat collections; the Fast Battleship _Virginia_ and the heavy cruisers _Anchorage_ and _Helena_.

With dredging eight years overdue and what port facilities had been present thoroughly decayed, unloading the fleet of 'transports' surrounding the three warships at the seawall would have been difficult. The engineers had solved this by the simple expedient of leveling most of the buildings for several blocks along the waterfront and bulldozing the rubble into the water, then pouring waterproof concrete and repeating, forming wharfs extending out into water deep enough for the re-purposed vessels to dock.

Apparently, 'waterproof' should have been prefaced with a 'kind of', and the improperly cured concrete would probably become rather inconvenient at some point in the future. But then, if we couldn't offload the supplies to strengthen the position, the future wouldn't be a concern.

Elsewhere, all across the city, small collections of light marked the positions of salvage crews at work. The purpose of that was twofold; to clear space in the city, and to strip it of useful materials. Waste not, want less.

There was one patch, of course, lit only by flickering firelight. The battle had been a stunning, overwhelming victory.

But there had still been casualties. Perfection remained ever-distant.

The pyres had burned down to coals now; most of the light came from the torches set as Watchlights around the burning ground.

The funerary customs of the Exile Forces were remarkable atavistic for a people who commanded such high technology. They saw no value in interring the departed in a dead world; and it was seen as largely disrespectful to allow anyone, but especially a fallen solider, to lie on the cold ground longer than necessary. A friend or comrade bearing witness to a through cremation was seen as preferable to a body being returned home. However, I still had little idea how the traditions had come about.

"We are a warrior people. This serves to remind us of that."

I turned, surprised. Fealty was standing near the center of the roof, her expression unreadable in the darkness.

"It is paradoxical, I believe largely by intention." She continued, as she walked toward me. "Field expediency. We lacked the resources for burial in the early days, and burning a fallen comrade was seen as preferable to leaving them for the Horsemen to devour. We used thermite at first; wood became a component later to add a touch of humanity.

Fealty leaned on the railing, looking out over the city. Her eyes seemed... _bright_ , as if they were doing more than simply reflecting the starlight.

"We see the corpse as a shell, once the person is gone, yet we are very careful in our casual treatment of it." She looked up, out toward the distant mountains, and sighed. "I believe it is intended to be human. We are creatures of paradox, you know. Our greatest gift and our tragic hamartia. Sometimes, I don't wonder if..."

I looked up at the stars, still amazed by their brightness and clarity. "That might be a good thing, though. I'm not sure perfection would be entirely desirable."

"And yet, you're up here ruminating about how the battle was less than perfect."

"That's part of it." I said.

I almost told her about what had happened. I wanted to. But I looked down at her shoulder, devoid of a unit insignia, and the dots came together. She'd never discussed her unit, and I'd never gotten a clear idea of what exactly it was that she did.

It seemed like too basic a mistake for a spy to make, and I wasn't entirely sure who she'd be a spy _for_ , but nothing else made any sense.

So I said nothing. Maybe that was a mistake.

But then, I'd make much greater mistakes in the days to come.

 **END OF PART ONE**


End file.
